Customer expectations are higher than ever. Amazon is raising the bar all the time.
And smaller brands are left playing catchup to offer great support on fewer resources while still maintaining profit margins.
Since awesome customer experiences are not optional, you need to start off with a great foundation.
The right ecommerce customer service tool can help you:
- support more customers simultaneously
- speed up response times
- reduce the time spent on managing queries and tracking orders
- and offer the best customer experience that you possibly can
Gorgias and Front are two of the many ecommerce support tools.
Let’s compare them so you can find the best fit for your needs.
Gorgias vs Front App - Quick overview
If you’re looking for a tool that has features from the best support tools on the market, try DelightChat as a Gorgias alternative.
Overview - Gorgias and Front
While both Gorgias and Front have similar functionality, there are notable differences that may make one of Gorgias vs Front, a better choice for your business.
But before we begin, let me give you a quick context for both the apps.
Gorgias is a help desk (help center or customer support) for eCommerce stores that allows your customer service team to manage all customer service in one place - be it emails, live chat, phone conversations, or social media.
Front brings emails and messages from every channel (email, chat, social media, SMS) into a collaborative team inbox. With great analytics, automation features, and clean-modern UI, it makes customer support easier for businesses.
Top Differences between Gorgias and Front
While the apps seem quite similar in functionality, what are the differences between Gorgias and Front that you must consider before making a choice? Let me walk you through the notable differences here.
1. Pricing
Pricing is the first difference that stands out. Gorgias prices the tool based on the number of tickets every month.
The Basic plan of Gorgias is $60/month for 350 monthly tickets. If you need additional tickets for a month, they can be purchased at $25 for every 100 tickets. With higher plans, the overall cost per ticket begins to go lower.
The benefit of ticket-based pricing is that you can have unlimited team members onboard. The pricing continues to stay in control if you guesstimate the average monthly tickets correctly. This lets you scale your team without worrying about the added costs.
On the contrary, Front prices its plans per agent. The lowest plan starts at $19/agent/month which is suitable for smaller teams of up to 10 members.
The cost per agent rises as you scale operations and add more agents. While this is a disadvantage, smaller brands can benefit from the unlimited conversations that you can have at a fixed price.
So, Gorgias offers a better deal for larger teams. Front offers a better deal for small teams.
Pricing: Gorgias ✅ | Front ✅
2. Interface and Layout
When you’re planning to use a tool for the entire workday, it is equally important for it to look and feel good.
The user experience offered by Gorgias is quite clunky though it looks good at first sight. The menus and ticketing interface is cluttered with unnecessary details which could have been displayed within a support channel instead.
On the other hand, Front has quite a modern interface where you only see what’s required. You may notice the difference immediately by observing the first panel from the left on Gorgias and Front.
At DelightChat, we realized this was a problem many users faced and decided to fix it at an affordable price. Here’s what the interface looks like - our customers and the team love how it turned out to be!
We built the interface such that you and your agents can have all information at your fingertips, without being overwhelmed. If you’re interested to try it out, schedule a demo here.
Interface: Gorgias ❌ | Front ✅
3. Autoresponse Capabilities
Most of the customer queries are repetitive. “Where’s my order?” “How long will my order take?” “What’s your refund policy?” “How long does it take for the refund to get credited?” etc.
And the answers are generally the same, only modified with specific details. What if you could automate these repetitive queries.
Gorgias offers highly customizable autoresponders with intent identification. You can add keywords that your customers use in repetitive questions and provide automated responses based on the intent.
These responses can be automatically customized with the use of variables that add customer-specific order tracking links or other information automatically.
Front does have autoresponder capabilities but quite a basic one in comparison to Gorgias. It allows you to set up rule-based responses. So you’re limited to the rule triggers that Front has created in their automation. You can use this to automatically reply when a customer messages you after hours, or you want them to know that they’ll be attended to shortly before an agent can respond to their query.
Autoresponse: Gorgias ✅ | Front ❌
4. Shopify integration
When supporting ecommerce stores, you switch between the store and the support channels pretty often. This could be to search for customer details in the system, pull up order details, modify orders, or even create new orders for customers.
Gorgias stands strong in terms of deep integration with Shopify. They allow you to pull customer orders and even modify orders right from the chat screen.
While Front can integrate with Shopify, the integration only displays order and customer information on the chat screen. To make changes, you’d still need to go to the Shopify dashboard.
DelightChat also supports on-screen Shopify order modification with a deep Shopify integration. For businesses who want a modern and affordable tool that seamlessly works with Shopify, try DelightChat.
Shopify Integration: Gorgias ✅ | Front ❌
5. Auto tag conversations
You may want different types of conversations to be assigned to specific people or teams. While it can be done the normal way - by asking customers to choose a type from a dropdown list - there is a better way out.
With the intent identification feature in Gorgias which is the technology behind its auto-responses, you can set it to automatically tag a conversation based on the type of intent the query has.
This becomes quite a time saver as your team no longer has to identify and assign tickets to the right teams.
Now Front does not have an in-built auto-tagging feature but integrates with MonkeyLearn which is a machine learning tool. The tool identifies the sentiment of a customer query.
You can connect with Zapier to automatically tag the query as per the sentiment identified. While this does require technical know-how to get implemented, the MonkeyLearn support team helps out with your queries on priority. Learn more about using auto-tagging on Front here.
Auto-tagging: Gorgias ✅ | Front ❌
Top Similarities between Gorgias and Front
It seemed to me that both the apps are a lot more similar than they’re different. So unless the differences mentioned above are dealbreakers, you could go with either of the two without sacrificing a lot of functionality.
Let’s take a look at the similarities between Gorgias and Front.
1. Integrations
Customer support is a mixture of various business processes. Your support team needs to keep an eye on multiple support channels, order details, shipping information providers, and more.
Gorgias integrates with a host of software that you might use to run your ecommerce business. Yotpo, Klaviyo, Postscript, Channel Reply, and pretty much any tool you can think of.
Front also offers integrations through 3rd-party apps as Gorgias does. So both tools integrate with the majority of the business tools out there seamlessly.
Make sure to take a look through the integrations pages for Gorgias and Front to make sure they integrate with what you need.
2. Multi-store support
If you run more than one ecommerce business, it’s quite challenging to manage support for all of them. On top of that, if you have to log in & log out multiple times just to respond to a support query, it’s a clear inconvenience.
Gorgias and Front both support multiple stores on the same app. You can connect all the stores that you manage within either of the apps, connect the support channels for each store and begin supporting them independently from the same app.
This can help you streamline your customer support and make it easier for your team to handle multiple queries coming in from all the different channels.
3. Knowledge base
Having a helpdesk is useful for both your customers and your team members. Consider the scenario of repetitive questions. If you create an FAQ page about your refund policies, shipping time details, etc, customers can refer to these pages and get answers to their questions.
While Front and Gorgias do not have an inbuilt help center, both of these tools integrate with a 3rd party tool called HelpDocs that allows you to create a knowledge base for your store.
You can allow your team members to create FAQs as they come across repetitive questions. New team members can also refer to these documents and get up to speed with their work.
4. Support channels
As both the tools are built with omnichannel support in mind, Gorgias and Front integrate with major social media channels.
Additionally, Gorgias also integrates with Phone systems and is slowly moving towards building its own phone management system for its customers.
So if you plan to incorporate dedicated phone support for your store or receive queries from other places apart from the support channels, you may want a tool that allows manual ticket creation.
Knowing that this is quite an important piece for ecommerce businesses, we added manual ticket creation capabilities in DelightChat.
So if a customer ends up messaging you on your personal email or personal Twitter account, you can create and track the ticket right from the app.
Customer reviews
Real customer reviews for Gorgias
The good:
"My favorite part is having access to all of the Shopify info while responding to Tickets. It's also such a time saver being able to issue refunds in Shopify from Gorgias." - Vionic Shoes Canada
“Gorgias has been such a great value add to our business. It's so easy to manage communication with our customers and respond back to them in an organized and timely manner.” - Pladra
The bad:
“If your domain e-mail is not g-suite, you may have e-mail delivery issue for outgoing e-mails; I know there are ways to work around this, but it's complicated and not documented by Gorgias.” - Zen Art Shop
“Not good for campaigns with different types of Shopify stores. Pricing is too high for a tool that is supposed to manage a good chunk of data” - Personalized Jewel
Real customer reviews for Front
The good:
"I love being able to comment to teammates and to create a client-specific e-mail for our clients to respond to in order for collaboration to be smoother and for communication to be shared."
"I really like the ability to set timers for emails to reappear in my inbox, and having the ability to assign and @mention team members are also helpful features that use daily."
The bad:
"The thing I struggled the most to adapt to was the Tags functionality. It is not something we use daily but had a slight learning curve for me and my team."
“Somewhat messy overall feeling. Sometimes conversations can be hard to follow. This applies especially to users who don’t use it all the time. Especially older folk tend to have problems but even younger and not-so-technical users can be heard saying ”I don’t understand anything about this”. After a certain amount of time the huge majority will get used to it, but be prepared to give users proper education when you start using Front. It is very important to learn to keep things clean all the time and archive emails which are handled, or snooze them which cannot be handled yet.”
FAQs
Between Gorgias and Front, which tool is more suited for small stores?
With a small support team, you should go with Front. The per agent pricing is easy on the pocket when you are just starting out. But as you begin to scale your team, you may need to consider an alternative to Front.
Gorgias can be a good choice but when switching from Front, the cluttered interface that Gorgias offers can be a hindrance and slow down your team.
If you want an affordable, yet modern alternative to Front, you can check out DelightChat.
Which of Gorgias and Front offer a live chat widget for your ecommerce website?
Both Gorgias and Front offer a live chat widget. So you only need to choose which of these tools are better suited to your needs.
Is it difficult to set up Gorgias or Front for your business?
Being self-serve tools, you would not require any help to get them integrated into your customer support workflow. However, if you do need assistance, the support team can offer you advice. You can also refer to their setup documentation on the websites.
Considering more options?
As Shopify store owners, customer support takes hours of your time. And you don’t want something to add to your busy schedule.
Now, Gorgias and Front are great choices but have quite a learning curve. To top it off, Gorgias is cheaper but has a cluttered UI, increasing your effort in organizing conversations. Front is expensive but doesn’t work well with Shopify.
DelightChat solves both the problems at an affordable price.
- The interface is designed to be familiar so you can use DelightChat without any training whatsoever. Once all your support channels are integrated, you’ll feel right at home!
- Integration is easy too. And to make it easier, we offer a 1:1 concierge setup with any plan that you choose.
There’s a lot more and you can explore the features and pricing to know further.
Hope this guide helps you make an informed decision. If you have any questions, feel free to drop a line here.