Founded in 2015, Gorgias (pronounced 'gorgeous') is a relative newcomer to the customer support space, but it has quickly come to dominate among DTC brands. And for good reason. Gorgias was built from the ground up for eCommerce companies. Its integration with Shopify (our recommended eCommerce platform) is the best in the industry, its automations allow agents to quickly work through tickets, and its interface is one of the most user friendly. Many software companies like to say that their tool is ‘plug and play’, but Gorgias is one where that’s actually true.
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Best for: Small ($1-10M), Medium ($10-50M revenue) and Enterprise ($50M+ revenue) size companies.
Gorgias was built from the ground up for eCommerce businesses. It's the most user friendly customer support solution and is our recommended tool for customer support.
Installation & ramp up
It is easy to install and ramp up on the Gorgias platform. Gorgias typically takes about a week to install and doesn’t need development resources like Zendesk might require. Zendesk is feature rich, but there is a steeper learning curve than Gorgias. Because of the intuitive UI, users of Gorgias reported shorter ‘nesting periods’ (the amount of time it takes an agent to fully ramp up on the tool and role). Users commented that maximizing the value of ZenDesk often required an administrator type role similar to those common with a tool like Netsuite. More things are possible with Zendesk, but they require technical people to do custom configurations. Gorgias works out of the box – no administrator needed.
Shopify integration
Gorgias has a best-in-class Shopify integration (our recommended eCommerce platform). You are able to edit Shopify orders and refund payments directly from the platform (with one major drawback – see what we don’t like below). The entire customer order history will also display in the right-hand pane. Speaking with a high LTV customer who has spent over $1k with your business? Know that immediately with Gorgias.
Automations
Gorgias makes it easy to create rules to respond to tickets. Responding to WISMO tickets (Where is my order) is easy with automated WHEN THEN rules. E.g., when a customer asks where their order is then send a link to shipping tracking information. Gorgias users felt that the tool had better out-of-the-box automation features than competitors like Zendesk especially for eCommerce businesses.
Knowledge Base
One goal of a strategic customer experience function should be to get fewer tickets. One of the best ways to reduce the number of tickets is to empower customers to answer their own question. Gorgias has a knowledge base feature that allows companies to build white labeled robust FAQ pages that are on brand and allow customers to easily find answers to their questions (example from Krave Beauty). We believe Gorgias used to charge for this feature, but now it is available at no extra cost. The ease of navigating a Gorgias designed FAQ page vs an in-house HTML version is night and day, and companies should see a drop in the number of tickets per order when they implement this feature.
Customer support for Gorgias
Gorgias has a very responsive customer support team. We were surprised to find that many competitors selling a customer support platform had poor customer support (Zendesk’s customer support was described as ‘downright dystopian’ by one user). Like most tools, the level and amount of support from Gorgias will scale with the size of your company.
Pricing
While we think Gorgias is the best customer service platform for eCommerce companies, that performance comes with a premium price. Gorgias charges per ticket rather than per agent like most customer support platforms, so price comparisons are slightly more difficult. We've taken Gorgias' own benchmarks that 50 tickets per day is a healthy average number of tickets that an agent can respond to in order to translate per ticket pricing to per agent pricing and compare Gorgias' pricing vs its competitors.
‘Flat’ tagging / ‘Parent child’ tagging
With Gorgias you can only tag tickets with a primary dimension and are unable to include secondary dimensions out-of-the-box. E.g., a customer returns an item and an agent tags the ticket with ‘return’ there isn’t a secondary tag option to say the return happened because the size was wrong. Platforms like ZenDesk allow this multi-dimensional tagging. Keep in mind that customization often requires developer support on ZenDesk. Workarounds on Gorgias are to create a tag structure that includes the primary and secondary dimension in a single tag e.g, ‘return-sizing’ for a return that happened due to incorrect sizing.
Reporting
Gorgias reporting and analytics are generally useful, but for certain customer experience metrics like tickets per order, users will need to pull data from Gorgias and Shopify into a Google sheets dashboard or data platform like Looker.
Customer view
The primary data structure in Gorgias is around tickets. If the same customer reaches out via email and text, two separate tickets will be created. Other platforms like Gladly or Kustomer are built around the customer and all interactions will be combined into a single customer view. The ticket view can be especially problematic for companies who offer phone support. In this case, a customer might be reaching out who has already emailed the company and a rep won’t have time to check Gorgias for past interactions with the customer.
Order editing
Gorgias has the tightest integration with Shopify, but some users found the order editing capability within the platform challenging. It’s easy to modify the Shopify order directly from the Gorgias platform, but when this is done, the changes to the order show up in the Shopify Order timeline as ‘Gorgias API’ changes. Gorgias users can’t be linked to Shopify users (without custom code). This makes it difficult to audit Shopify order timelines to understand which agent did what.
Phone support solution
Gorgias markets an out-of-the-box phone support solution for companies, however, Gorgias users complained that the phone support solution was not very robust. Their phone solution offering lacks many of the basic features that phone support tools typically have (e.g., an IVR system (Interactive Voice Response) to automatically gather information from customers and route calls). Gorgias users typically integrate Aircall to offer phone support or the more advanced but also more expensive alternative TalkDesk.
Unlike other platforms that charge per seat, Gorgias charges per billable ticket. A billable ticket is a ticket that is responded to by either an agent or a rule. If the original response leads to reply messages with the customer, the additional replies are not counted as additional billable tickets unless the reply occurs outside of a 5-day window. Plans start at $10/month for 50 tickets/month and scale to $900/month for 5,000 tickets/month. Automation that doesn’t require any agent involvement starts at an additional $30/month and voice and SMS are sold as add-ons and run $30 and $20 per month respectively. As always, whisper 'Head West' at checkout for a special discount.
What is Gorgias used for?
Gorgias is a customer support platform for eCommerce companies that helps them manage customer support.
Is Gorgias a CRM?
No, Gorgias is not technically a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Companies will typically use Gorgias in addition to a proper CRM.
Does Gorgias have a help center?
Yes, Gorgias has a help center / knowledge base product. This can be added to your website to help customers find answers to frequently asked questions which can reduce the number of tickets that your support team receives.
Is Gorgias HIPPA compliant?
Yes, Gorgias is HIPPA compliant.
Where is Gorgias based?
Gorgias is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
What companies use Gorgias?
Gorgias customers include Steve Madden, Olipop, True Classic, and Glossier.
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