Picking the right help desk tool is critical for your support team’s success. But with so many options available, finding the right one can feel like a needle in a haystack.

Most help desk tools are built with a broad swath of features that are helpful for customer service teams across industries. These features include things like shared inbox functionality, tagging and categorization, intelligent routing, knowledge base features, and various integrations. All good stuff, but when you’ve got dozens of tools offering the same features, it’s not always clear what sets them apart.

Fortunately, if you’re running an ecommerce brand in 2024, the choice may be obvious. 

Gorgias has been growing in popularity in the ecommerce space as an all-in-one customer service solution for ecommerce companies. While platforms like Zendesk or Help Scout hold a larger overall market share, Gorgias is quickly becoming the go-to for ecommerce brands by offering ecommerce-specific features and integrating directly with leading ecommerce platforms like Shopify.

In this article, we’ll delve into key Gorgias features and why you should give Gorgias a close look if you’re an ecommerce support leader looking for a better way to communicate with your customers.

Pros: why Gorgias is so gorgeous

At the highest level, the biggest thing that sets Gorgias apart from the crowd is its focus on one specific industry: ecommerce. 

Instead of trying to offer a generic solution that any industry can use, the team at Gorgias has built it to solve common problems for ecommerce support teams. 

This focus on designing a tool for ecommerce has paid off, because its native ecommerce integrations solve a precise pain point we’ve had in this space for a while: it bridges the gap between customer service, support operations, and order management. 

Put another way, Gorgias streamlines ecommerce customer service and brings all of your support channels, customer details, and order information into one place.

Here are the top three benefits you’ll enjoy when using Gorgias for ecommerce customer support.

1. Order management made easy

Every ecommerce support agent and leader knows how painful it is to constantly copy and paste tracking links and order info between different tools and pages. 

(Cue browser tab overload.)

In fact, many of us have experienced the stress of accidentally canceling or refunding the wrong order due to human error. 

But that doesn’t have to be the case if you’re using Gorgias. It has native bidirectional integrations with the most popular ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, which means you’re able to pull in relevant order info and manage orders directly from the Gorgias interface. 

This eliminates the need for constant tab-shuffling and copy-pasting, saving your team time and minimizing the risk of human error.

2. AI trained for ecommerce themes to automate manual work

Ecommerce support requests tend to follow a predictable pattern. 

In our experience working with many different ecommerce brands, about 80% of ticket volume revolves around common issues such as shipping and delivery, order change requests, return and exchange inquiries, and questions about discounts and stock availability.

Recognizing this, Gorgias has built AI-powered solutions that work wonders straight out of the box. The Gorgias AI can accurately identify message sentiment and retail-specific intent, triggering automated actions to tag, assign, close or respond to tickets based on the identified themes. 

From automatically replying with order tracking info to identifying and prioritizing urgent requests, these AI-powered features can alleviate a ton of work for ecommerce brands. That makes it way easier to scale your customer support, whether you’re working with an in-house team or an outsourced customer service team.

3. Smooth onboarding and intuitive user experience

Gorgias also stands out for its user-friendly approach, particularly when compared to other popular service desks that often require extensive onboarding and setup before getting started. 

Many users appreciate Gorgias’ intuitive design and straightforward onboarding flow – it’s not uncommon to be up and running with Gorgias’ core features in less than an hour (although you can spend plenty more time customizing things for your brand as needed). Here’s what one G2 reviewer had to say:

“I like the simplicity of use and setup. It contains so many features but are all easy to use and train my team to use.”

While Gorgias packs a lot of power, it’s really easy to get your team set up and focused on helping customers quickly.

The top Gorgias features you should know about

Gorgias is a great fit for growing ecommerce teams running on Shopify, Magento, or BigCommerce.

Although it may lack some of the more sophisticated reporting and customization features when compared to a tool like Zendesk, Gorgias is the best in the game when it comes to efficient ecommerce customer support. 

Three specific features illustrate why:

• Two-way integrations with ecommerce platforms
• Intent detection
• Revenue reporting

Let’s deep dive into each one.

1. Two-way integrations with major ecommerce platforms

Gorgias sets itself apart with its native two-way connections to the top three ecommerce platforms. You can conveniently view and edit customer and order details from Shopify, Magento, or BigCommerce directly within Gorgias.

Ecommerce platforms => Gorgias

Much like other tools, Gorgias can pull in customer and order details from your ecommerce platform.

The big difference with Gorgias is that you can leverage these details, such as order numbers and tracking links, within macros and automations to speed up the process of handling simple order-related questions. 

For example, tracking update requests can be handled with a single touch, thanks to macros with dynamic fields:

And Gorgias can do this all natively without the need for cumbersome add-ons or Zapier workflows that sometimes break, disrupting your workflow for hours or days.

Gorgias => Ecommerce platforms

That’s all great, but the true gold lies in the ability to action orders directly from Gorgias. 

With just a few clicks, you can create, edit, refund, duplicate or cancel orders, all without leaving the ticket view. That means no more need to keep your store’s page open at all times. Your team will save a ton of time with this functionality.

Common use cases for ecommerce support teams include:

• Address change requests: solve them with a single touch using macros with automated actions.
• Automated refunds: automatically refund shipping costs for delayed orders or initiate partial refunds for orders when products arrive in damaged packaging.

Order cancellations: reply to order cancellation requests and cancel orders with a single click.

2. Intent detection

Gorgias excels in identifying message sentiment and retail-specific intents through its AI algorithms. What sets this functionality apart from similar tools is its remarkable accuracy, achieved through training the algorithm specifically on ecommerce tickets.

The algorithm can successfully identify the following:

Sentiment:

• Positive
• Negative
• Threatening
• Urgent
• Offensive

Intent:

• Discount, exchange, refund and return requests
• Order cancellation and change requests
• Wrong or damaged order reports
• Subscription cancelation or change requests
• Shipping and delivery issue reports
• Stock and product questions
• Feedback
• Simple thanks

Of course, simply detecting sentiment and intent isn’t particularly helpful on its own. The real value comes from using these identified themes to trigger automations and generate reports. Popular use cases with Gorgias include:

• Auto-tagging social media comments: track how customer sentiment changes over time by auto-tagging tickets from social comments based on the identified sentiment.
• Assigning threatening or offensive messages: direct tickets with threatening or offensive sentiment to team members qualified to handle such requests.
• Auto-closing tickets: free up your team’s capacity for customer questions by auto-closing tickets with simple “Thank you!” messages.
• Auto-tagging based on customer intent: understand your support request structure by auto-tagging tickets based on customer intent and saving agents’ time on manual tagging.

Gorgias’ Rules section can leverage intent in simple If/Then statements to trigger automated actions

3. Revenue reporting

Customer service plays a crucial role in fostering brand loyalty and retaining customers.

But support teams are often viewed as cost centers, and it can be quite challenging to justify customer service return on investment, especially in ecommerce.

Gorgias makes it easier with revenue statistics enabling you to measure how much money your support team is generating by helping customers.

When agents handle customer requests, they obviously influence conversions and sales. With Gorgias, you can easily pull up a report of “converted tickets” (those followed by a sale within five days) to understand the impact your support team and quality service have on conversion rates and overall sales.

Source

Moreover, Gorgias allows you to view the total amount paid by customers for orders associated with these tickets. These are crucial figures to present next time you have to negotiate additional headcount or resources for your customer service team.

What else do you get with Gorgias?

In addition to the standout features mentioned above, Gorgias offers a range of standard features that you would expect from a help desk tool:

• Support channel integrations, including email, live chat, phone, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram (including comments!) and even TikTik Shop messages. 
• Shared inbox with macros for common queries, tags for reporting, ticket assignment options and smart views for workload management. Gorgias comes with an AI Agent co-pilot too, allowing agents to translate, summarize or adjust the tone of a reply with a single click.
• Live chat widget that can be embedded on all of your Shopify pages with a single button click, enhancing real-time customer support.
• Simple knowledge base functionality to publish FAQs and other helpful information in either an internal or external help center.
• Automation features, including autoresponders, article recommendations, and the ability to create custom flows to automatically handle customer-facing interactions.
• Smart rules, automating manual tasks such as ticket assignments or tagging based on keywords. Gorgias provides pre-built pre-built rule templates to get you started with just a few mouse clicks.

Things to consider before purchasing Gorgias

As it goes with any tool, there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind when considering Gorgias as your help desk:

• Gorgias reporting and analytics are significantly more limited than in a tool like Zendesk (although to be fair, lower-tier Zendesk plans also include some limitations). Gorgias calls its reporting section ‘Statistics,’ and while it includes many common customer service KPIs, the ability to filter and create custom metrics is limited.
• Data syncing can be slow and it takes some time to update ticket status or edited settings. This may not be a deal-breaker for smaller support teams, but it’s worth considering. For high-volume support teams where every second counts, an additional 10 seconds spent on each ticket can add up to a significant amount of wasted time by the end of the day.
• Limited customer support on some plans. Gorgias users often complain about slow service and difficulties in getting help from Gorgias support. Unless you have a dedicated custom success manager (included with the higher subscription options), you might face difficulties in promptly resolving your issues, especially when dealing with bugs.
• Pricing structure for Gorgias isn’t as simple as $X per agent per month. Instead, you’re billed a flat amount based on your ticket volume. If you exceed that limit, you’re billed $36 for every additional 100 tickets. If you’re growing quickly or you encounter a big issue one month, a spike in ticket volume can make Gorgias difficult to budget for.

It’s important to weigh these points against the overall benefits offered by Gorgias to understand if it aligns with the needs and scale of your support operations.

Ready to level up your support team?

Great customer service is a key component of building long-term brand loyalty. For ecommerce companies, loyal customers mean more recurring orders and increased average order value.

With stakes this high, investing in the right tools is a no-brainer.

Whether you’re starting to build your support team from scratch or considering a switch from your current helpdesk provider, Gorgias is a fantastic choice if you’re in the online retail space. It helps ecommerce teams across the globe delight customers and save agents’ time.

Of course, just signing up for a new tool won’t transform your results overnight. You need to implement the tool the right way, while also finding exceptional human customer service agents to help your customers. 

At Peak Support, we can help with both. 

We know that your customers have high expectations, and your brand’s reputation is on the line. We’ve partnered with incredible ecommerce brands like Ministry of Supply, Public Rec, and Wildgrain to build great customer experiences, and we can do the same for you.

Book a discovery call today to learn more about how our experienced team can help your ecommerce brand grow.