Gorgias

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Regardless, I really hope Gorgias doesn't fall into the trap of trying to compete with the outdated and dying email/ticket paradigm.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 :)

We downloaded and set everything up losing our whatsapp history in the process - the app is good but we would still need to go outside of the app to manage facebook group comments and others areas such as whatsapp ony being able to reply within 24 hours which doesnt work for us over the weekends - regrettably will need to find another solution

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.

Pretty good!