Kommando review for Gorgias

June 29, 2018

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 Regardless, I really hope Gorgias doesn't fall into the trap of trying to compete with the outdated and dying email/ticket paradigm.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