Gorgias

Gorgias (pronounced “gorgeous”) is a help desk system that’s given itself a fairly narrow mission: It only wants to handle support for e-commerce vendors, and even in that category it’s most effective with only three popular platforms. This necessarily puts it behind our much more well-rounded Editors’ Choice winners, Freshdesk and Zoho Desk, but if your needs fit into Gorgias’ mission, it’s got a lot to offer. For one thing, it can do social media sentiment analysis, which you won't find in too many competing platforms. An artificial intelligence (AI) engine scans the web looking for either negative or positive customer comments about your product then surfaces what it finds inside the app. You can now quickly turn an angry customer's frown upside down or send a happy customer an upsell email. It's all focused around an e-commerce store operation, but that is what you need Gorgias is definitely worth a look.

Gorgias Pricing and Plans

Pricing is another area where Gorgias stands apart. Most of the products we tested use a per-agent-per-month pricing model. Gorgias, however, only cares about how many tickets you're processing every month and then builds its price from there. You'll find a free tier that you can use to evaluate the system, but you'll need an active e-commerce shop to make that work. Testing anything new in a live environment is always a tricky prospect, so proceed with caution.

For paid tiers, you'll start with Basic, which costs $50 per month for up to 350 monthly tickets. An additional 100 tickets at this level will cost you $25. All Gorgias levels include unlimited users, Shopify and social media integration, live chat, as well as macros and rules.

The Pro plan runs $250 per month for up to 2,000 tickets with each additional 100 tickets bumping that number by $23. Additional features at the Pro level include a guided onboarding process, Magento integration, user permissions, satisfaction surveys, and chat campaigns.

At the Advanced tier, you get up to 6,000 tickets for $625 per month. Each additional 100 tickets will cost $14, and the list of features now includes team management, view sharing, revenue statistics, and a dedicated customer success manager. Finally, there's a Custom tier that handles unlimited users and supports a ticket volume you'll negotiate directly with Gorgias. It'll also let you enlist the company's help in building more complex customizations.

A Different UI and Some Unique Features

The first thing that jumped out at us when we first got into the app is that the basic interface closely resembles an email client. That's a stark contrast even to other small business-oriented help desks, like Freshdesk and Zoho Desk, which are usually oriented around a ticket queue dashboard.

But this design choice is intentional because once you get comfortable, it actually makes sorting through tickets fairly easy. And not just from a management aspect but also visually since it has color-coded ticket categories and an easy order entry process. It's different in another aspect, too, namely sales. Other help desks tend to start their work after the customer has purchased something. Gorgias makes customer orders the primary interaction target, which also lends itself well to the email-esque interface.

Views are how the system defines different customer contact and information channels. These show up on the left side of the screen similar to how Google Gmail displays folders and categories. You can customize what your reps see in these views and even build all-new views of your own. The data they're displaying comes from filtered information taken from tickets and the tags on those tickets added by either the system or another user.

But while you can customize a view, it's not something any user can do. All customization will need to be done by someone with either lead agent and administrator privileges. Finally, you can mark a view as either shared or private. Shared views are restricted to specific users or teams while private views are seen only by the owner.

A big feature focus for Gorgias is automation. To this end, you'll get macro-driven, templated responses that help you set up low-touch customer support. These templates can also help with data gathering for later analysis. For example, you could automatically collect data on any customer complaint about not just a particular product but a particular pain point with that product. You can then use that to build more efficient automated responses to the problem and hopefully prioritize it during your next update.

Integrating with other platforms is another area where Gorgias has placed significant emphasis. The three key e-commerce platforms it likes are BigCommerce, Magento, and Shopify, but there's also an App Store with a much longer list of add-on apps. For example, you could add Loop to your Gorgias-Shopify combo and you'll get automation across the entire product return process. Or you could tack on Aircall, which will give you phone support and the ability to create tickets directly off a call. There are loads of other integrations covering everything from analytics to email to deeper social media data mining.

The goal here is flexibility even inside the narrow scope of Gorgias' mission. You won't find much of the broad help desk features that come with platforms looking for a wide swath of customers, like remote control or SLA management. But if you're a smaller e-commerce shop, the App Store will let you build a highly customized service desk particular to your business, store, and product type.

Getting these integrations working isn't super-easy, but Gorgias has made it as simple as it can. You'll still need to walk through several steps on both apps, but if you need help, the system has good docs and there's also live chat assistance available in every view.

Ticket Management

Gorgias may have a narrow focus, but it still needs to deal with some of the same core help desk challenges as any other system, and that starts with ticket management. Creating and managing tickets can happen in several different ways. Agents can create tickets from the main Tickets screen, which also displays a list of filters based on the current view. When you click on the Create Ticket button you see a form that looks a lot like an email creation page. It does, in fact, eventually send an email to the customer with text either typed in by the agent or auto-generated using a template or macro.

The templates and macros your reps use the most will appear when you click on the Search bar. Hovering over one of them displays the associated text in the body of the email. Once you select the customer in the To: field, you'll have the appropriate information added to your email. You can also edit, create, or delete a macro by clicking on the gear icon.

Another option here is to open the Manage Macros page, which brings up a list of all your available macros and then lets you do the same kind of editing from there. There's a duplicate button on this page that'll let you make a copy of an existing macro and then customize it.

If you want customers to have a self-service portal, Gorgias has you covered, but right now it's only working for Shopify stores, though Gorgias says it'll be expanding that list in the future. The portal not only gives customers a way to get to support resources, but it also lets them check on their order status. Any problem there and the customer can immediately create a ticket that automatically shows up in the unassigned tickets list.

A very nice feature is that you can have Gorgias auto-generate a ticket based on certain events. For instance, if there's a sudden spike in a particular kind of complaint. Even better, tickets can be automatically created based on events that happen in other apps, too. Say a customer has a problem paying through your payment processor, Square. You can associate a ticket for that problem automatically.

The system uses Zapier to handle this kind of cross-app integration. Because Zapier is aimed more at general users, this shouldn't require any actual coding on your part. But it's still complex enough to make you walk through a number of steps on both sides of the app equation to hook everything up properly.

The last form of ticket automation is the rule. Rules are used to automatically close tickets that contain messages that don't need a reply. You can also use them to tag incoming tickets so they get routed to the right person or show up in a particular ticket list. And just like an autoresponder in an email marketing app, you can set up a ruled to automatically reply to certain kinds of inquiries, like an order status request or asks that happen outside of normal help desk business hours.

Reporting and Data Export

At first glance, this is one area where Gorias will come up short when compared to most of the other contenders we tested. But again, consider its mission, and you'll find the system handles reporting adequately. Still, it's not outstanding even for something focusing only on e-commerce.

All reporting functionality falls under the category of Statistics. Those categories include your canned reports, namely Overview, Tags, Channels, Agents, Macros, Satisfaction, and Revenue. You can filter each of these categories by date or by selected items such as Channels. You'll get back a graphical data visualization in most instances, but if you want to play with the raw numbers in a spreadsheet or third-party business intelligence (BI) tool, you can export the numerical data to a CSV file.

That's pretty basic, though, so Gorgias says it's partnered with several BI providers so you can import data to them directly for deeper data digging. The integration with Microsoft 365 will presumably give you a path to Power BI, but more targeted e-commerce BI partners include Alloy, Churn Buster, and Glew.io.

Good Features For a Narrow Focus

Gorgias is looking to do one thing and do it well. If you're a small to midsized e-tailer that's using BigCommerce, Magento, or Shopify, then Gorgias can definitely handle your help desk needs. Its core feature set is solid and it has a good catalog of compatible apps. But if you're looking for anything outside of an e-commerce scope, you'll want to skip Gorgias and check out broader solutions, like our small business Editors' Choice winners, Freshdesk and Zoho Desk.