Gorgias is a great customer support tool tailored for ecommerce and DTC brands, but it isn't the only great option available in the market.
You might have different requirements from an ecommerce customer support tool, or perhaps you are looking for a simpler tool that is easy-to-use. Or, one that integrates with the other apps you use to run your store.
You don't need to look any further, because we have researched for you. We recommend these 6 amazing customer support tools along with their pros and cons. If you’re actively looking for a Gorgias alternative, you’ve landed in the right place.
Here are the tools we checked out:
- Richpanel
- Reamaze
- DelightChat
- Zendesk
- Freshdesk
- Help Scout
Before we go into describing the alternatives, let’s have a quick look at why Gorgias is regarded as the leader in ecommerce customer service.
Gorgias
Gorgias is a customer service software designed for ecommerce stores. They’re primarily a Shopify app but recently they’ve integrated with WooCommerce and BigCommerce. They deeply integrate with Shopify that helps support agents to deliver great customer support seamlessly.
Pros:
- Gorgias deeply integrates with Shopify that enables them to pull customer data right into the dashboard. Additionally, it helps you modify an order, initiate refunds, and a host of things that you otherwise need to visit the Shopify admin dashboard to accomplish.
- In Gorgias, you can custom tags and use them to tag conversations for future reference.
- Gorgias integrates with most of the channels (email, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) where you can potentially receive a support query.
- The great thing about Gorgias is that you can create highly customized Macros to automate replies to commonly asked questions.
- Last but not least, they have intent-detection which enables you to detect customer intents like shipping, refund, exchange, and many others. You can then set up automatic replies or route the tickets with tags.
Cons:
- Gorgias is a bit clunky and not very easy to use. There’s a steep learning curve to use the product properly.
- It’s super expensive. The plan with all the features costs $750/month with a cap of 6000 tickets/month.
- Collaboration is not seamless on Gorgias. It’s not easy to handover a conversation to a different support rep or asks someone for help when you need it. You might end up using another internal chat tool to collaborate within your team.
- Although this depends on personal preference, a lot of customers say that Gorgias is more of a ticketing system than a conversation tool. In 2021, store owners love to converse with their customers as opposed to leaving them up like a lifeless ticket.
Now that you know about Gorgias, let’s take a look at some of its alternatives and how they fare against Gorgias. Keep in mind that not all alternatives are better (or worse) than Gorgias. It purely depends on what you need to manage your customer service effortlessly
Richpanel
Richpanel also helps ecommerce merchants manage their customer service. With Richpanel, you can easily track, manage & resolve queries in no time. You can manage all your support channels, viz., live chat, email, WhatsApp, Facebook & Instagram. This saves a lot of time & helps the support reps be more productive.
Pros:
- Richpanel saves you countless hours by bringing the most used support channels onto one dashboard. This includes live chat, email, Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp.
- Its self-service feature can help you eliminate up to 30% repetitive support requests. It offers a personalized experience where customers can view/track orders, peruse FAQs, and start a new conversation too.
- They integrate with top ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento & WooCommerce.
- In Richpanel, you can create self-service workflows to resolve the commonly occurring scenarios for your support
Cons:
- According to a lot of customers, Richpanel can be quite difficult to navigate. To put it simply, it’s not exactly intuitive.
- Even though Richpanel is slightly cheaper than Gorgias, it’s still considered an expensive tool among ecommerce business owners.
- You’d ideally want a tool where you can seamlessly collaborate with your team. Richpanel isn’t built for that. You might still have to use an additional tool to collaborate with your teammates for day-to-day activities.
- Richpanel caps the number of orders you can process on the platform. In their lowest plan, you can process a maximum of 1000 orders per month.
Reamaze
Reamaze is an awesome helpdesk software for ecommerce brands. It’s often said to be the closest competitor to Gorgias. It helps your team to resolve customer queries seamlessly. The live chat feature in Reamaze is well known in the market.
Pros:
- Reamaze is known for its live chat feature because of its customizable chat experience and instant ‘check order status’ bot. It also boasts other functionalities like FAQ-search, status page (you’ll know if you order’s delayed), pre-built bots, and more.
- They’ve something called Cues which their chatbot feature that triggers messages based on URL/UTM, time on site, Shopify activities, etc. This enables you to personalize your customer’s experience at a deeper level.
- The live dashboard enables you to see the users that are currently interacting with your site. Equipped with this, you can try and send a personalized message to generate a sell or simply help them better.
- It’s also one of those tools that integrate with almost all ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, WordPress, Magento, and the likes. It’s also great at GDPR compliance that helps you sell peacefully in the European market.
Cons:
- The collaboration functionality within Reamaze isn’t exactly a walk in the park. To manage customer support seamlessly, you might need to collaborate on a completely different tool (Slack/WhatsApp) by sharing screenshots from Reamaze.
- Reamaze charges on a “per user, per month” model. This can turn out to be expensive when you support tickets grow and you’d need to add more reps to the team.
- It’s more of a ticketing tool than a conversational one. It doesn’t gear you to have a conversation with a customer and build a relationship.
DelightChat
DelightChat is an ecommerce customer support tool built for SME brands that enables them to deliver stellar customer service. It’s designed with a conversation-first approach that enables you to manage your store’s support & effortlessly resolve customer queries - all from a single screen.
Pros:
- DelightChat enables you to respond to customer queries & collaborate with your team, all from a single screen.
- It integrates with live chat, email, Facebook (comments), WhatsApp & Instagram (comments) so that you can track & resolve queries from different channels effortlessly.
- DelightChat is at least 2X cheaper than Gorgias across all the price plans.
- DelightChat doesn’t penalize you when you add more users to scale up your customer support operations.
- Most importantly, you can collaborate with your team right within the app itself. No need to toggle between tabs as that leads to a loss in productivity & loss of work hours.
Cons:
- For now, DelightChat only integrates with Shopify that allows it to access your Shopify admin dashboard data. However, it will soon be available for others with other ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce, WooCommerce & Magento.
- DelightChat is still in its infancy and has just launched its waitlist for the private beta. So, there are a lot of features that are yet to be developed.
- DelightChat doesn’t support Macros (or automation). This might be a detriment to the larger brands that cater to thousands of queries every day.
By the way, we’re offering 3 months free on DelightChat if you sign-up for the beta today. Check it out.
Zendesk
Zendesk is a multi-billion dollar SaaS company that helps organizations with customer support software. Zendesk comes with a host of features, integrates with almost all the apps in your stack, and caters to industries across the board. If you think of customer service software as an industry, Zendesk would be at the helm.
Pros:
- Zendesk claims to have one of the best live chat tools available in the industry. The chat tool comes with a host of features like behavioural triggers, live visitor tracking, chat ratings, file sending, and a lot more.
- It comes with a powerful knowledge base (FAQs) feature where you can store your visitor’s most asked questions, relevant information about your ecommerce store, and the lot.
- It also comes with a unified communications interface where you can answer your customer queries natively. Some of the platforms they support are WhatsApp, WeChat & Facebook.
Cons:
- Zendesk is clunky and not intuitive. It can be really difficult to get started without a full-blown demo from the sales rep.
- It is NOT built for ecommerce brands. Ecommerce brands have specific needs. Their customer support management is different from other industries. Zendesk doesn’t cater to that as they’re a generic tool.
- It can be very expensive. Their support suite Professional plan costs $89/month/user.
- You just can’t collaborate with your teammates on Zendesk easily. They have basic collaboration features but that doesn’t facilitate having a seamless conversation.
Freshdesk
Freshdesk (from Freshworks) is another popular name in the customer service industry. Freshworks was named the only “visionary” on the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center. It comes with an exhaustive set of features that makes it an all-inclusive customer service tool for companies across industries.
Pros:
- Freshdesk boasts omnichannel customer service. They integrate with pretty much all the channels through which a customer may contact you. This includes live chat, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, email, Facebook, and the likes.
- Freshdesk integrates with over 600 apps besides the ones already in the Freshworks ecosystem. This makes it easier for someone to opt for Freshdesk if they’re already using a product.
- Their chatbot called Freddy AI lets you deploy intent & behavior-based bots that trigger when it meets the requirements.
- Freshdesk comes with several in-app collaboration features that make it easy for team members to work together and resolve tickets.
Cons:
- Freshdesk is not a tool you can master in minutes. You need a demo and a few hours to understand how everything works. Safe to say, it’s not self-serve.
- It is NOT built for ecommerce brands. Ecommerce brands have specific needs such as deep platform integrations, customer information, modifying order data, and more.
- They're not quite affordable, especially if you want to unlock the main features. Their omnichannel helpdesk costs $77/month/user. It’s not a good fit for SME brands who are striving to do their best and need an extensive set of features.
- Although Freshdesk comes with in-app collaboration features, it’s not very helpful to have a seamless conversation with your teammates.
- It’s designed as a ticketing system that treats a customer as a soleless ticket. This gears a mentality of “resolving tickets” and not “having a conversation”.
Help Scout
Help Scout is a clutter-free customer service software that helps companies have meaningful conversations with customers. It’s another one-size-fits-all solution that matches your expectations when it comes to managing customer service. It has all the right features that can greatly enhance your productivity and save countless business hours.
Pros:
- Help Scout offers shared inboxes. This is a unique feature that lets you group email inboxes by teams, functions, etc. For example, you can have the customer support inbox shared across 5 team members and the Ops inbox with 2 team members accessing it. This helps with productivity.
- They also come with the knowledge-base feature along with a doc site that hosts all the FAQs.
- You can send intent & behavior-based messages with its in-app messaging feature whenever someone’s on the website and they meet the conditions.
- It integrates with a host of tools including Shopify. So, that’s a plus.
- Last but not least, Help Scout’s reporting feature is second to none. Track SLAs, # of conversations, happiness score, and the whole shebang.
Cons:
- Even though Help Scout is an awesome software, it’s not made for ecommerce. It lacks the features and the design that’s meant for ecommerce stores.
- To manage all the customer queries across different channels, it’s easier to have everything on one screen. That’s not the case with Help Scout. You need to navigate around to find stuff that makes it work.
- Help Scout’s basic plan starts at $25/user/month which quickly becomes EXPENSIVE if you have a large support team of 10+ agents.
- You can’t add more than one store to the same account if you run multiple ecommerce stores. It’s a huge loss in productivity when you’re logging in/out of different accounts.
Well, that's all you need to know about the most viable alternatives to Gorgias. Each one is unique and has different features that can map to different use-cases.
As an ecommerce business owner, you need to decide on a tool that will make your customer service function a piece of cake. Our research should hopefully have made it easier for you to pick the right tool.
