Gorgias

Disappointing. The reviews (outside shopify, e.g. reddit and other forums) are true. Their own support is very disjointed and leaves a lot to be desired. Each question took 6 hours+ to get a response on their own chat function. Areas that did not work for us:
- Live chat functionality is pretty useless. I tried their beta and their automations leave a lot to be desired and no, you can't put in a proper work around. We were using tidio to run chat bots whereby we offer a new customer promo. There's no suitable workaround for this. If you run one of their 'campaigns' you can't run it outside of business hours.
- Their pricing is pretty obtuse. You pay per ticket. I gave it a chance. We liked the feature of sending an auto response to inbound email tickets to acknowledge receipt and give an SLA. Personally I feel reassured when I receive acknowledgement and an SLA on when I can expect to receive a response. If you choose this, all responses are counted as tickets. So in respect to inbound emails, spam or not, everyone counts as a ticket.
- The demo I received from Jasper was 25 mins of preamble and 5 mins of visually seeing the platform with no demo of how to use it. Having tried Gorgias, FreshDesk & Chat, Zohodesk and Re:Amaze we've ended up going with Re:Amaze. The functionality is intuitive and they're not trying to run before they can walk.

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.

I've used a lot of software/apps for my business and many of them fail to get the fundamentals right. Gorgias is a delightful exception and does in fact make handling support cases easier...even enjoyable?! I have been using Gmail with a CloudHQ integration which accomplishes fairly similar things in terms of basic support functionality. That method is just clunky and doesn't offer any of the other valuable integrations like Shopify and Shipstation.

I have just started working with rules and macros, but it seems like this will solve some major pain points. Right now the only reason that this isn't a five star review is the app seems like it needs a bit more development. It's awesome and very close to spectacular.

The first day I started using Gorgias I went home and was telling my wife about how much I liked it, and she said it was the first time I'd ever done anything but complain about previous software :)

A great app, I see a lot of potential down the road...
Download it today!

All week I trialed different support apps in the order below

1: freshdesk, you get a lot of stuff for your money but none of it works. They're a lot of bugs and support is terrible.

2: Zendesk, Really expensive, terrible customer support especially tech team (literally the worst customer support I've ever experienced). I actually didn't manage to even set up the app in order to use it. overly complicated. terrible worst of the 3 by a long way.

3: Gorgias, Easy to set up. simple interface and just seems to work. I would give it 5 stars but the pricing for me as a small business is off putting. 60 dollars a month and still a ticket limit is why I didn't go for Gorgias from the start. things it doesn't have I wish it did. an option for live chat user to switch to their preferred messenger app...Facebook / Instagram etc and the chatbot options are a little thin from what I can see. but all being said. Don't waste your time on the others you'll end up pulling your hair out. Gorgias is easily the best if your new to customer service apps and want something very well integrated with Shopify. oh yeah. and currently I'm on the starter tier while I figure out what I might need. A lack of support on this tier is also another reason i didn't initially go for it.

Integrations did not work during the call with a Gorgias employee but we were already charged a fee (which was refunded later). We also tried to solve the issue by ourselves but the documentation is not totally clear and we do not have enough resources for an extra task. It is frustrating to sign up to a new platform and run into problems from minute 0. I think the integration should be smoother and also they could offer a free implementation service for all the plans. Also the chat support service was not friendly and they took a lot of time to respond to our concerns.

It does not work on Firefox. Secondly, when you try to access the app through the shopify window, it takes you to a "sign up new account" window, which is a useless loop. You then find your way to your support tickets, but cannot find the settings from there. Mostly, it does not work on Firefox, and this was verified by the support agent.
Poorly designed app and is not functioning.

I've tried various helpdesks in my store from the incumbent to a spreadsheet and everything inbetween.

I was blown away at how easy the setup Gorgias was to pull in our customer information and eliminate having to open multiple tabs for things.
I also really like the integrations, specifically recharge for us.

Full disclosure, I liked the platform so much, I applied for a job with Gorgias and got it!

Their team is extremely responsive and helped me out with multiple issues. Loved dealing with them!

The app is great, and the onboarding was easy. A couple of odd things happened here and there, like Instagram and FB disconnecting without notice. They told us they have no control over that - okay, but at least let me know the integration is gone and we need to reconnect. We did not answer any social query for 3 days until we noticed there was something wrong. Now, the TRUE dealbreaker for us is the file upload capability. It's 10 MB PER EMAIL!! Not even per file!! We create personalized paintings, so we need to send out customers high-resolution files. 10MB per email is just miserable, considering the app cost. A free Gmail account allows you 25 MB per file. Zendesk too. That would be enough for us. After spending time resizing, compressing, resizing again, etc., we are about to cancel the service since we spend too much time doing unnecessary tasks. We talked to support about this, and all they said is that they don't have a direct line with engineers and will add it to some feedback list. There are no plans to change that. So if your business needs to send files to your customers, bear in mind that this app will be a pain. I hope they can give us a solution, though.