Gorgias: AI Helpdesk & Chat

We switched from Intercom to Gorgias due to the advanced macro and scripting capability offered. Unlike Intercom, Gorgias is clearly built for eccomerce/Shopify, and offers a much more reasonable price point for your average merchant. We quite like having a ton of customer information alongside tickets, and not leaving the conversation to access Shiphero/Shopify is a huge plus.

Gorgias is a relatively young platform, especially when compared to Intercom. This can be a good thing (small team, quick and continuous development etc) but it is also reflected in a more primitive UI/UX.

Intercom's back end was intuitive and functioned more like a chat client than a ticketing system. Our support staff loved this since it showed when customers were 'online' and allowed them to hop between tickets effortlessly. Intercom also had a very developed app, which complemented this concept wonderfully and allowed easy "off hours" support during sales events.

This is where Gorgias has room to improve. Simple quality of life and front end improvements like auto-saving draft replies from help desk members, live chat estimated wait times, and set live chat availability hours would all greatly increase the utility of the platform. The Gorgias team has said an app is scheduled for early July... I can't comment on that until I see it.

Regardless, I really hope Gorgias doesn't fall into the trap of trying to compete with the outdated and dying email/ticket paradigm. It reminds me a lot of the desktop first vs mobile first debate... in a couple years there will be no question that "Livechat First" will be the industry standard.

With this in mind I hope to see strong and continued development of the live chat platform. The team should look take a close look at intercom's core offering and replicate as much of the functionality as possible. This would put them far ahead of the zendesks of the world, and push them into a best in class service for Shopify with no out of the box parallel.

If this is not done, intercom will likely close the gap by updating their integration with Shopify; I know they are actively developing more eccomerce features with an eye to do just that.

Horrible customer support. This is very strange because this is a customer support app, but it looks like they have to work more on improving their support!

One of the worst apps to use for customer service. 1. They updated how they pull in comments for Instagram ads without notifying us and started charging based on # of ads which is ridiculous 2. Their support "live" team is horrible - take 10-20 minutes to reply to each message. Will send one half-assed response, I'll reply to the chat right away, will not reply again for another 10-20 minutes. How is this "Live" support? How can a customer support platform have horrible customer support? STAY AWAY FROM THESE CROOKS

They care about profit more than the value they give to small businesses. I've heard many great things about them, and I was excited to try. Somebody contacted me after I had downloaded the app and told me they would be interested in getting on a call and go over the app and it's features. It sounded like a beneficent way to onboard a new customer into a pretty complicated app (at first glance atleast). I spoke to a charming salesperson, Zoran, who had told me about an onboarding specialist helping us set up and such.. But there was a catch, you had to sign up for their PRO plan that was in the ballpark of $300 a month. The first month was "free". There was no consideration for our business and how much we'd use it, even though I told them we wouldn't use that often in our non-busy season and once we got busier, MOST of our inquiries come from our Etsy channel. So it's very important that they have an Etsy channel integration. I emphasized that point numerous times. He said he'd look into it. I got out the call thinking that as nice as the guy was, he only cared about the sale more than anything else. We had a call in a week, and his attention to my top concern would provide a light whether my suspicions were true. As soon as we got on the next call, he said - and I think i'm paraphrasing here - "are you ready for the PRO plan!?". No mention of Etsy. It was just about making the sale. I called him out on the fact and said that there's no chance of us being on the PRO plan now for this year. That means no onboarding for us. The whole fake vibe of Zoran changed once he knew there would be no chance at us going on the Pro plan and pay $300 a month. The conversation swiftly ended after that because I mean, why talk to somebody who isn't paying your bills? For my fast growing business, I think we'd be better off using another provider that would care about building the relationship while we're small.

We use this app for email support and chat. We've tried a few different ones and Gorgias is probably the best. It's still missing some functionality though. To be completely honest, it seems as though the company is in growth mode and more focused on fundraising/growth than appeasing it's existing customer base. Feedback and response times on slower than average when compared to other apps, but I would still recommend this app.

If you stay with Gorgias long enough, you’ll become an “appreciated loyal customer”. This means that they’ll put you on a legacy plan which no longer receives any new core features. This became apparent for us recently when they updated their Instagram integration to also allow replying to Instagram DMs (sounds like a core part of the Instagram integration right?). Turns out we can only access this core Instagram integration feature if we update our plan to either: a) a much shittier plan for the same price. or b) a slightly less shittier plan for 5 x the price.

God these guys! Alright, they spammed me multiple times to go review and so I'll do it. Love the idea of the app, but their own support is really so poor it makes me worry how anyone can use their app for support. If you want to use Android, don't bother-- there's no app AND the web integration is completely broken. (It's close but has a major bug where you can't type anything to respond.)

The CEO spams us with requests to review. I reply telling them their Android browser site is completely broken for responding to tickets-- I get two completely different people responding (not the CEO) and they're clueless as to what's going on or how to fix the issue. So they just say "use iOS" or something-- this is 2018, no idea why that's even possibly a response.

Then I get another spam from their CEO saying I should review the app. So here I am... I hope they're happy! Maybe he reads these?

Oh, and before I even tried Gorgias for real I asked them if they had a very simple feature via FB messenger-- I asked them if a customer could view their own tickets across different services or if they were left piecing it together from their chat logs/etc. Seems like an obvious help desk thing to do, right? Let customers see their own ticket history and responses, etc? (Just like what agents see, or perhaps cleaner...) but no, no such feature. Not the end of the world not to have a feature (I signed up anyway), but the support experience from them on Facebook was so bad. I realize now it's because they're using Gorgias itself and have multiple people responding. So the 1st person didn't understand what I was asking (hadn't seen a real helpdesk portal before I guess) and brushed me off--- then the 2nd person was confused, too. Finally I think that when I was fed up they put someone who was STILL confused, but at least was more cordial and finally understood what I was asking to tell me that, no, the novel feature of giving my VIP customers a way to see their ticket history wasn't something they'd thought of before (or didn't seem to have a desire to add). Like I said, not the end of the world not to have a feature like that-- perhaps I'll write it myself, but it should have tipped me off how bad their support quality is.

The app itself on desktop is fine-- though it has a long way to go to be easy to use. If you have a lot of tickets, the very flat view structure they have will limit you and get cluttered/confusing (as the defaults already are). A little more iconography or folders or something would go a long way. Rules and their integrations seem to work pretty well, so I can't really fault them there-- I think that will go okay, especially if they work to refine things.

But fundamentally if their own company can't even use the tool to create good support for their own tool, it really worries me that the entire premise of the tool is flawed for good support. It feels like whoever is on staff grabs any ticket and their goal is very rapid closing without actually solving issues-- and because the agent changes and they're rushed, they don't really engage at all to understand the question or issue.

TLDR: App has potential, but (1) their own customer service is responsive but dismissive/un-engaging/etc which makes me feel like their own tool doesn't lend itself to amazing customer service (or they don't understand good customer service enough to be building this app), (2) they have no feature to let customers follow their own ticket history (which is big for building long-term loyalty and is found in most ticket systems), and (3) they literally ignore one of the most popular browsers on earth (Android/Chrome) and are dismissive that it doesn't work when they don't have an Android app yet. Oh, and they'll spam you to review their app without even bothering to be sure you're satisfied.

they say on the highest plan they will have someone dedicated to your account and that's a bologna , getting someone to get us up and running and help us design the campaigns is a task, we are still waiting for that dedicated rep who was supposed to help us 2 months ago. Software is good but promises are a joke.

I regret ever migrating from Re:Amaze. I cant comment on the software iteself because I cant get past the horrific customer support. Getting any help from Gorgias is like pulling teeth. They have zero regard for their customers time. STAY AWAY FROM GORGIAS IF YOU ARE GOING TO NEED ANY SUPPORT. And their support documentation is junk.

Byer beware, the $60 subscription requires that you agree to a $10,000 not to exceed monthly limit. Your giving them permission to bill your credit card up to 10k per month uncontested instead of pausing your subscription in the event of a hack.