If you want to keep your ecommerce customers happy and coming back for more, then there's no denying that you need a good customer support platform. Having an integrated tool on your website and other channels ensures that customer questions and issues get handled promptly. As a result, your customers will be more likely to continue shopping with you and leave positive online reviews about your brand.

In this article, we take a look at two popular customer platforms, Gorgias vs. Zendesk, and how either of them can work in tandem with Chatdesk to keep your customer service operations running without a hitch.

Why Ecommerce Brands Need a Customer Service Platform

If you're an ecommerce business owner or manager, then you know that running a successful online store is a lot more involved than just creating a website, integrating with a few ecommerce tools, and hoping for the best. To be successful, you need to offer your customers a seamless shopping experience. That means building trust with them, providing stellar customer service, and connecting with them wherever they are engaging with you.

The challenge of balancing all of these responsibilities can be overwhelming for small teams that lack the resources they need to keep up with all of their customers’ demands. This is especially true if they don't have an integrated customer service platform that allows them to easily manage all of these tasks in one place.

Most ecommerce brands find that they need a way to streamline their customer service practices across multiple channels, from social media to text to live chat. With an integrated customer service platform, it’s possible to pull together and automate your customer support processes and deliver a better customer experience. Here's why having this type of platform can benefit your ecommerce brand.

You Can Deliver Personalized Experiences for Every Customer

Ecommerce platforms are facing a new reality. Customers expect more than just a great product. They want an experience that's personalized and seamless.

This includes having an easy way to contact you about orders, returns, exchanges, product questions, and other issues. They want answers fast, and they’d rather not have to jump through hoops to get their questions answered.

You Can Automate Repetitive Tasks and Free up Your Team for More Complex Issues

Customer service platforms are sophisticated enough to answer frequently asked questions, handle many common issues, and redirect customers to self-service tools. This means that with the help of automation, you can often assist your customers without having to involve a live agent.

Should more complex cases arise, the platform can gather the most important details before transferring tickets over to agents. From there, they will have all of the information in front of them to quickly resolve customer inquiries.

You Can Make Smarter Business Decisions

Customer service platforms can help streamline and improve operations across your company. You’ll have increased productivity, letting everyone work smarter, not harder. You’ll have a clear picture of your customers and their needs, so you can deliver what they want. You’ll be able to optimize the user experience on your website and apps. You’ll even improve customer relations across channels, from social media to email.

Read on for our guide to Zendesk vs. Gorgias, plus an explanation of why it makes sense to integrate Chatdesk with either platform. Not only will you be able to create a robust support team capable of handling all of your customer support needs, but you’ll also improve the customer experience.

What Is Gorgias?

Gorgias is an ecommerce customer service platform that helps Shopify merchants provide high-quality customer support. The idea is to increase conversions by turning visitors into buyers via a personalized shopping experience. With Gorgias, it feels more like a conversation with a human than a support ticket opened with a bot.

Pros of Using Gorgias

• Collaboration. Gorgias supports collision detection, meaning you won’t have two agents replying to the same conversation. It also allows for reminders, so your team can keep track of customer information for follow-up or future reference.
• Omnichannel customer support. Easily respond to customer inquiries through social media, email, live chat, text, and even ads. Being ever-present from a single chat window reduces customer confusion, meets customers where they are, boosts sales, and increases ad effectiveness.
• Automation. Create automated responses to common customer questions like “When will my order arrive?” or “How do I exchange my item?” This speeds up customer response time and lightens the load on agents, so they can save their energy for more demanding issues.
• Mobile app. The mobile version of Gorgias allows you to access accounts from anywhere — which is especially helpful when traveling or working with remote teams.

Gorgias' Pricing

There’s a free trial available; pricing ranges from $10 for the Starter version, which includes 50 tickets per month, to Advanced at $900 per month for 5,000 tickets.

For Enterprise level beyond 5,000 tickets, contact Gorgias for a custom quote. Lower tiers offer more limited integrations. However, you can always scale up as you grow.

What Is Zendesk?

Zendesk offers many of the same ecommerce support features as Gorgias, allowing for easy automation and collaboration. As with any SaaS platform, there will always be slight differences in the user interface and features available.

However, as you consider Zendesk vs. Gorgias, think about the possible use cases; Zendesk may be a better option for some businesses in terms of its features, ease of setup, and out-of-the-box tools for agents — particularly those that are more than just ecommerce.

Pros of Using Zendesk

• Collaboration. Agents can easily collaborate across teams without leaving a ticket or doubling up with another agent. For instance, the “side conversations” feature integrates with other apps such as Slack to allow agents to reach out to, say, the finance team to issue a refund.
• Omnichannel customer support. Zendesk also allows for responses from anywhere your customers interact with you, including messaging, live chat, email, voice, and social. Conversations stay connected everywhere, ensuring agents can always pick up where a previous agent left off.
• Self-service. Build and integrate your own help center and community forum where customers can seek out answers themselves. With the help of automation, you can also give instant answers and steer customers in the right direction. Empowering customers to help themselves without involving agents cuts down on agent workload and resolution times.
• Mobile app. Zendesk also has a mobile version to allow for easy access to all accounts and conversations while on the go.

Zendesk's Pricing

Zendesk also offers a free trial; the Suite Team plan is $49 per month per agent.

Suite Growth and Suite Professional plans offer enhanced options for an additional price. 

Enterprise plans start at $150 per agent per month, or for an added investment, you can opt for a fully customized version built to your needs.

What Is Chatdesk?

Chatdesk is an outsourced customer service platform with real US-based agents who can handle your support inquiries. You can think of Chatdesk as your built-in support team that can not only handle customer questions and concerns but also boost your conversions and improve your overall customer experience.

Most ecommerce brands use a platform like Gorgias or Zendesk to power their customer support across all channels, and they’ll pair it with Chatdesk as the voice behind their support team.

Essentially, Chatdesk will help answer tickets and boost conversions through Gorgias, Zendesk, or the like — freeing you up as the owner or manager to focus on other business needs. So once you’ve addressed the issue of Gorgias vs. Zendesk, you can add Chatdesk to your arsenal of customer support tools.

Pros of Using Chatdesk

• Ease of setup. Get up and running with Chatdesk in about a week. Chatdesk’s Center for Excellence team will deliver personalized onboarding support and instant integrations. With Chatdesk’s community of 6,000 customer experience pro, you’ll have agents answering your tickets quickly and easily.
• Coverage 24/7. Unless you want to have to be on the clock yourself at all hours of the day, it’s to your advantage to integrate with Chatdesk. They’ll provide 24/7 support with a variety of issues, including order status, returns and exchanges, cancellations, refunds, technical troubleshooting, product questions, and more.
• Consistent brand voice. Chatdesk’s US-based agents will learn and assume your brand’s tone of voice and messaging on all channels, from social platforms like TikTok and Instagram to email, SMS, and chat. This ensures a better, more consistent customer experience regardless of where your customers are contacting you from.
• Social engagement. Have you ever left a comment on a brand’s social media page, only to be ignored? It’s likely not that they don’t care, but rather, they don’t have the systems and technology in place to respond to users on social channels. Chatdesk will make sure every comment, question, and direct message gets handled professionally across platforms. Moreover, we will hire, train, and schedule “Superfans” — people who are passionate about your brand — to respond within your brand’s voice and policies.
• Ability to deflect calls. Chatdesk will help to shift callers to chat and self-service options to resolve their inquiries. This reduces the volume of inbound calls and improves the customer experience.
• Automatic insights. Chatdesk aggregates feedback from all channels and analyzes it to provide useful customer insights. You’ll save time by not having to pull together data from various channels while also gaining a greater ability to identify trends and new opportunities.

Chatdesk's Pricing

With zero upfront costs and no annual contracts, Chatdesk is an affordable solution to your customer support needs. You pay per ticket resolved, making it a win-win for you and the customer.

You can get started on Chatdesk’s support features with a free pilot that includes your first 100 tickets or two weeks, whichever comes first. You also get free setup for support on social channels, flexible coverage, white-glove launch support, and all the insights you need to start improving your CX right away.

From there, the $99 Starter plan includes 40 ticket resolutions per month at a cost of $2.50 per ticket. As you grow, you can scale up to a higher tier, all the way up to 2,000 ticket resolutions per month for $3,900, which comes out to $1.95 per ticket.

If you’re looking for call deflection, this service starts at $99 per month for 400 calls deflected. If you tend to get a lot of calls that can easily be answered through automation or a knowledge database, the call deflection service could be worthwhile.

Lastly, you can add on Automatic Customer Insights at no cost for the first 1,000 tickets.

Bottom line: It’s easy to get started with Chatdesk with no upfront costs and then scale up to a higher tier as you grow. And if you’re growing, the money you save on customer resolutions will quickly outpace any costs associated with a higher tier.

Conclusion

Opting for Gorgias vs. Zendesk largely depends on the use cases and the features you need for your particular business. If you're specifically an ecommerce brand or website, then Gorgias could be a better choice. However, Zendesk may offer more enhanced features for SaaS customer service or those that are more than just an ecommerce site.

The matter of Gorgias vs. Zendesk vs. any other help-desk platform is important to figure out for any business that has an online presence. When considering Zendesk vs. Gorgias, you may wish to take advantage of the free trials to assess which one best meets your needs.

In any case, Chatdesk is a great option regardless of whether you choose Gorgias vs. Zendesk. If you're looking to scale or outsource your customer support to U.S.-based agents who can help you answer tickets in Gorgias or Zendesk, then Chatdesk is a no-brainer.

No doubt, customer service is one of the most important aspects of running an ecommerce business. It's also one of the most difficult to get right. With Chatdesk to assist in up-leveling your support through Gorgias or Zendesk, it’s safe to say that your support operations will be dramatically improved.