Zendesk vs. Gorgias

Zendesk offers businesses powerful omnichannel capabilities across email, live chat, phone, social media, and more. Customer service agents can meet customers on their preferred communication channel without losing context, enabling them to seamlessly continue the conversation. During a live chat or on a phone call, for example, an agent can view the previous exchanges the customer has had with the company and key account details, like order history or account type.

With a unified omnichannel workspace, the customer isn’t burdened with having to get the agent up to speed. The result is increased efficiency for your team and improved customer satisfaction for the company.

Gorgias also lets its users centralize their communication channels and work from a shared inbox, but its use is much more limited. Voice capabilities are only available as an add-on and there are only 10 phone integrations listed on its website.

Customer self-service features come standard with Zendesk, so you can help your customers get answers whenever they need them. With Zendesk, businesses can create knowledge bases, community forums, and chatbots that remove tasks from your agents’ workloads.

Zendesk also provides its users with advanced tools that help streamline knowledge management. Content Cues identify gaps in your knowledge base, so you can proactively create or improve articles for better performance. Businesses can also control customer access to articles through authenticated portals.

Gorgias lets businesses create a help center that includes the basics, like FAQ pages and order tracking, but it lacks the robust features that Zendesk provides. Community forums and authenticated portals are unavailable, limiting a business’s ability to aid its customers.

Zendesk gives businesses full control over their workflows so they can run their operations the way that’s best for them. Omnichannel routing lets you route tickets based on availability, capacity, and ticket priority. Intelligent triage automatically determines a ticket’s intent, the language it’s written in, and the customer sentiment (positive or negative). Pairing these two features lets you incorporate a ticket’s intent, language, and sentiment into your routing rules, while still taking availability, capacity, and priority into consideration. You can also set up workflow rules that trigger the next step for a ticket so that it doesn’t get stuck in limbo.

Gorgias lets businesses assign tickets to a group of agents it has created with a specific skill. But this kind of routing isn’t considered intelligent as it’s just following team-assignment rules.

Giving your agents a unified space where they can work and collaborate helps them stay organized and aligned while carrying out their duties. The Zendesk Agent Workspace helps teams do this, and more, by providing:

• Macros: Agents can use predefined responses to send standardized replies and save time with common requests.
• Ticket tags: Zendesk can automatically add tags to tickets to provide additional context and improve routing.
• Custom fields: Organize tickets with customer information that you need to optimize workflows.
• Service level agreement (SLA) management: Ensure you uphold customer contracts.
• Side conversations: Bring in other teammates for help on a ticket without leaving the window.

The Gorgias agent workspace lacks the deep customization that Zendesk offers. While an agent can customize their own private views, only admins and lead agents can customize shared views. There’s also a limit of four custom ticket fields for the entire account and they lack conditional logic. Gorgias also notes other limitations to setting up ticket fields here.

Zendesk makes it easy to collect real-time and historical data across every channel. You can also generate both pre-built and custom reports regarding team performance, customer behavior, and channel activity. These reports include your desired metrics, so you can measure what matters most to your organization.

Businesses that use Gorgias don’t receive the same functionality from its analytics. Users can’t generate custom reports in the app, so they must export their data. The pre-built reports in the app only have basic filters, and the data is limited in what it can provide, like the dollar amounts of tickets.

Zendesk has over 1,500 integrations, including highly rated apps for the e-commerce market, to bring together data from all parts of your business, such as inventory, billing, shopping history, and preferences.

The Shopify app alone has over 15,000 installations. See how the Zendesk and Shopify integration is helping Raddish Kids streamline support by reading its customer story.

Gorgias only has around 100 integrations in its app store. It doesn’t list the user ratings of the apps, so it’s difficult to determine how well they perform. Many of the integrations also require users to code their APIs (application programming interfaces), adding to the cost of the service.

Zendesk AI is intuitive for agents to use and available alongside all their tools in a centralized workspace, empowering your team to be more productive. We use proprietary models that understand customer intent and sentiment, so your bots are smarter and more helpful. Our AI works from day one and is ready to go in minutes. No need for developers, heavy IT spend, or months of lead time.

Some of these features include:

• Pre-trained chatbots that your team can deploy across channels to support customers 24/7.
• AI-generated insights that offer agents suggestions on how to best respond to customers.
• Intelligent triage that routes tickets based on customer intent, sentiment, and language and aids workflow distribution.

The Gorgias automation provides responses to basic questions, order tracking, and recommending knowledge base articles. However, it lacks the range of Zendesk AI, like advanced routing.

Zendesk keeps you connected with your customers’ preferred social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, and X as well as popular messaging apps like WhatsApp. With Zendesk, you can also embed a live chat widget on your website or mobile app, so customers can quickly reach agents when they have questions about your products.

Gorgias can integrate with Facebook and Instagram profiles but not X, which creates a blind spot for businesses striving to have omnichannel operations. It also provides a chat widget with customizable colors and auto responses.

Zendesk connects data from all areas of your operation—like inventory, billing, and customer preferences—so e-commerce businesses can create robust customer profiles and provide personalized service. Integrations with Shopify and Magento let agents pull order information into the Agent Workspace to provide detailed answers to customers.

Zendesk also helps you build an extended ecosystem of suppliers, distributors, and vendors. From design and development to distribution and analytics, it’s easy to manage all the moving parts, every step of the way.

While Gorgias lets agents manage orders from its platform, the Starter plan only includes Shopify-based stores. Businesses need to upgrade their plans if they have BigCommerce- or Magento-based stores.

A big draw of partnering with an established customer service platform is the access to pre-built features that allow a business to get up and running quickly. But that fast time to value doesn’t negate your inherent need to customize the platform to your needs. Zendesk empowers its users to mold its software to their specific needs instead of the other way around. A few ways it does this are with:

• Custom metrics: You decide which key performance indicators (KPIs) to include in reports, letting you track team performance and customer behavior.
• Custom knowledge base and help center templates: You can design the look and feel of your site with custom themes and easy-to-use editors.
• Custom workspace/agent experience: You can modify and add ticket views based on the most relevant conditions of your business. Customize dashboards to include live updates on department activity.

Gorgias also lets users create custom ticket views in their workspaces. Businesses can customize their help centers with logos and images, but more advanced customization requires coding.

Knowing what your team is doing at any given time is crucial to optimizing department efficiency. Zendesk makes it easy to manage workloads and keep tabs on agent progress. You can customize agent roles by granting permission and restricting access to information on an individual level.

On top of that, Zendesk users have access to Tymeshift, an AI-powered workforce management solution. This tool forecasts ticket volumes and automatically schedules teams based on future needs.

The Gorgias workforce management features let its customers grant user permissions. Businesses can control agents’ access to tickets and their roles in handling them, but only leads and admins can create shared and public views. Gorgias also provides a real-time view of an agent’s status so managers can manually assign tickets.