Approximately 95 percent of consumers say that customer service is vital for brand loyalty.
Closely tied to brand loyalty is customer service, which can help you increase your revenue and build a successful business in the long run. And hence, it becomes imperative that you choose the right tools to help your brand deliver delightful service to your customers.
To help you pick the right tool, we decided to compare the two leading ecommerce customer service tools in the market, i.e., Gorgias & Zendesk. Read through the article to understand their strengths and shortcomings and find the one best suited to your requirements.
While Gorgias is explicitly built for ecommerce merchants, Zendesk serves a wide array of industries and is currently the market leader in the customer service software. They rival in features, and both have thousands of customers worldwide using the tool to manage their customer service.
We also understand that they are our competitors, and so we have taken the utmost care to provide our readers with an objective analysis while comparing the two tools.
Overview
Before we begin to break down the similarities and differences, let me share a brief overview of both the tools to set the context.
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 excellent customer support seamlessly.
Zendesk is a multi-billion dollar SaaS company that helps organizations with customer support software. Zendesk comes with an exhaustive set 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 top.
Looking for a Gorgias alternative that’s affordable & easy-to-use?
Top Differences Between Gorgias & Zendesk
Ecommerce Viability
If you’re running a Shopify store, you need tools that integrate with that platform deeply. This helps to have all the necessary functionality readily available to the ecommerce business owner.
Gorgias is built for ecommerce and they integrate deeply with Shopify. This means that you can edit, cancel, return any order without having to leave the Gorgias dashboard. That’s not all – Gorgias comes with a host of integrations with other commonly-used ecommerce apps. This makes it all the more powerful.
Zendesk, although the leading customer service software, isn’t specifically designed for ecommerce companies. Although they have two apps listed on Shopify, it barely does anything other than responding to customer queries (which you could do with any app).
Chatbots: Gorgias ✅ | Zendesk ❌
Supporting Channels
Customers might reach out to you from any channel they prefer, and you need to reply within that channel.
With Gorgias, you can manage support on live chat, email, Facebook & Instagram. Zendesk also allows you to support your customers across those channels, but they got an additional one, i.e., Twitter.
Posts & Ad Comments
When you run ads or create posts on Facebook & Instagram, you will get comments. Some of them are support questions, while others might be queries about a product you sell. Either way, you need to respond to those comments and fast.
Zendesk doesn’t support responding to comments on Facebook or Instagram.
However, Gorgias allows you to respond to comments from posts and ads in one place after you’ve integrated your brand accounts on Facebook & Instagram.
Reply to Insta/FB Comments: Gorgias ✅ | Zendesk ❌
Access Customer Info & Order Modification
Suppose a customer asks to change the details of a particular order. In that case, you’d have to go to your Shopify (or whatever platform you’re using) dashboard, edit the order there, and then reply to the customer with the new order ID with a confirmation message. It’s hectic and inconvenient.
With Gorgias, you can view customer information on the right-hand side of the dashboard. Besides that, you can track an order (through integrations), modify it (cancel, refund, place a new order) and do all sorts of things with the deep Shopify integration.
Unfortunately, Zendesk’s integration doesn’t work that well. You can, however, cancel and refund an order but that doesn’t work as well as Gorgias. On top of that, you need to install Zendesk integration on your Shopify and simultaneously, install Shopify on Zendesk. That’s double the work – extremely time-consuming & unproductive.
Shopify Integration: Gorgias ✅ | Zendesk ❌
Supporting Platforms
Although Shopify is pretty much what everyone talks about when it comes to starting an ecommerce store, other platforms also cater to this market. The most popular ones are Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace & Magento.
Here’s a breakdown of the platforms that both tools integrate with:
As per the above table, Gorgias supports Shopify, Magento & BigCommerce but doesn’t support WooCommerce & Squarespace.
On the other hand, Zendesk supports all of the platforms but it doesn’t have deep integration with any of them – it’s a 2-way integration that supports sending & replying to customer queries.
Integrations
As you might already know, integration with other tools is super essential when it comes to managing your day-to-day business seamlessly. On that note, here’s what we found.
Gorgias integrates with a host of software that is mostly used to run an ecommerce store. Yotpo, Klaviyo, Postscript, Channel Reply, and pretty much any tool you can think of – Gorgias has got you covered.
Although Zendesk commands an army of integrations, it doesn’t help much because most of the integrations are generic tools and not ecommerce specific – something an ecommerce merchant needs to seamlessly manage their store.
Integrations: Gorgias ✅ | Zendesk ❌
Knowledge Base
A knowledge base on your website helps your customers quickly find answers they’re looking for without contacting customer service.
Zendesk comes equipped with a knowledge base feature where you could add all the necessary FAQ questions that your customers ask regularly or they might ask under particular circumstances.
Gorgias is at a loss here as it doesn’t have this feature, but you can integrate Gorgias with Helpdocs, a knowledge base software for ecommerce companies.
Knowledge Base: Zendesk ✅ | Gorgias ❌
Query Intent Detection
Any kind of hack to reduce your burden of responding to support tickets is a big help, especially as support agents get swamped with tickets every day from impatient customers.
Gorgias embraces this sentiment detection feature that uses machine learning to detect simple query intents like shipping, refund, exchange, etc. Furthermore, you can set up tags to direct the question to the right team or simply create automatic replies.
On Zendesk, you can create business rules using Triggers & Automations, but it doesn’t auto-detect the customer query’s intent. However, if you integrate your Zendesk account with MonkeyLearn, you will be able to create query-intent-based automations.
ML-based Query Intent Detection: Gorgias ✅ | Zendesk ❌
Pricing
Gorgias pricing comes with four plans; the lowest one starts at $60/month. You get 350 tickets/month. If you want to add more tickets, you need to pay $25 for 100 tickets. This rate goes down as the plan increases.
Zendesk for customer service starts at $49/user/month, with unlimited conversations. This is fine if you’re not in ecommerce and an SME where you don’t need more than 1 seat. It can get significantly expensive as you scale your ecommerce business.
Top Similarities Between Gorgias and Zendesk
Just knowing the differences isn’t enough to make an informed decision. Hence, we thought to add a section where you can also check out the similarities – this can add more context to your decision-making process and see if you’re missing out on anything.
Multi-channel Support
Both Gorgias & Zendesk offer multi-channel support to help you respond to your customers across multiple channels. You can reply to your customers over email, live chat, Facebook, Instagram & Twitter (only on Zendesk).
ℹ️ Note: Zendesk supports one extra platform, i.e., Twitter.
Macros
More often than not, support reps end up answering the same questions every day. Questions like, “Where’s my order?” “What’s the delivery time?” are surprisingly common. Macros can help answer these recurring questions. Macros are premade responses you can create to resolve your customer queries faster.
Fortunately, both Gorgias & Zendesk support macros to help your customer support agents save time and increase productivity.
Tags
Tagging a conversation helps you segregate and prioritize tickets. You may want to respond to specific tickets promptly or assign a set to a particular team.
This is a feature that’s available on Gorgias and Zendesk.
Reminders
This feature is used when you are expecting a response from any other subject, department, etc. It prevents you from providing full information to your customer. Sometimes you want to make sure that a customer has their issue resolved and perform a follow-up in case they don't reply first.
Fortunately, you can create reminders in both Gorgias & Zendesk (through a custom field).
ℹ️ Note: On Gorgias, it’s super easy to create a reminder – there’s a button for that.
Collision Detection
When more than one support agent can reply to the same customer message simultaneously, it’s a problem. In such cases, if you aren’t aware of who’s responding to the customer, it might get awkward at best, and at worst, the customer might get confused if two agents reply simultaneously.
Luckily, both Gorgias and Zendesk are equipped with this feature.
ℹ️ Note: On Zendesk, you can see whether someone’s viewing a ticket or not without opening the ticket itself.
Mobile App
If you’re traveling or not in front of the laptop, you can’t respond to customer queries. And every question is a lost opportunity to sell a product or to delight a customer.
Thankfully for us, both Gorgias & Zendesk come with mobile apps for Android & iOS. This will help you respond to your customers on-the-go.
Customer Reviews
Gorgias Customer Reviews
Company: Gent.One
Review: “We were looking for a chat that was able to expand to support multiple channels & brands, and we found that with GORGIAS!”
Company: Sash Bag
Review: “Gorgias customer service is above and beyond the standard tech experience; they are awesome to work with!”
Company: Simple Pledge
Review: “Great App, superb support team - quick response helped us set everything up. The App itself has cool features with Shopify. We are pleased with the system.”
Zendesk Customer Reviews
Company: Bellezza Republic
Review: “Even though it's not that easy to set up the whole app, after that it works at an absolute optimum. Besides, the support is fast, always available, and helps you very well!”
Company: LucyBalu
Review: “Did not work on Safari, but on Chrome the integration worked fine. Seems to be a very good solution to easily link Zendesk and Shopify without coding skills.”
Company: Mirror Image
Review: “We signed up with Zendesk to implement faster customer service. It's nice to be able to use a real live agent to chat with our customers about something specific.”
Common FAQs
1. If I just started my ecommerce store, should I go with Gorgias or Zendesk?
We’d suggest Gorgias as it is deeply integrated with Shopify (and other ecommerce platforms while being fairly inexpensive – their plans start at $60/month with 350 customer conversations.
But both the tools are targeted at enterprises, and their best features are reserved for expensive plans. In that case, you can take advantage of DelightChat, an ecommerce helpdesk solution built for SME ecommerce & DTC brands.
2. I need a live chat for my site. Which one should I go for?
Although both Gorgias & Zendesk allow you to add a live chat, we recommend going with Gorgias as it has more features tuned towards the ecommerce industry like you can track orders from the chat widget without even asking a customer care agent.
3. Can I set up Gorgias or Zendesk by myself or do I need external help?
Yes, both Gorgias & Zendesk are self-serve tools, and they got extensive documentation for the complicated stuff (if any). Plus, there are enough tutorials on YouTube that help you set up either of the software for your ecommerce store. Additionally, their knowledge base is quite expensive.
Looking for even better options?
Gorgias and Zendesk aren’t the only great support tools.
While Gorgias is excellent at supporting multiple ecommerce platforms, has useful features like replying to posts & ad comments, and comes with a vast array of integrations, Gorgias doesn’t support WooCommerce which accounts for 32% of ecommerce stores on the internet. It also becomes expensive as you scale your store.
Zendesk is pretty good at handling support queries and it’s reliable but it’s not made for ecommerce and it can get quite expensive as your business grows.
If those words resonate with you, perhaps you can take DelightChat for a spin. Here are a few reasons why DelightChat stands out from the competition:
- It is super easy-to-use (like Gmail, Apple Mail, or Messenger, only more powerful).
- It comes armed with all the powerful features an ecommerce brand can expect.
- It is relatively cheap so that it breaks your bank.
Our mission is to empower SME ecommerce & DTC brands with powerful software without breaking the bank. If you are such a brand, DelightChat might be the right customer support software for you.
And in case you want to learn how DelightChat is different from Gorgias & Zendesk, you can refer to the comparison pages here&here.
