95 percent of consumers say that customer service is essential 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 two leading customer service software in the market, i.e., Gorgias & Help Scout. 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, Help Scout serves a variety of industries including ecommerce. 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.
Help Scout is a clutter-free customer service software that helps companies have meaningful conversations with customers. It’s another easy one-size-fits-all solution that matches your expectations when it comes to managing customer service. It has all the features you need to greatly enhance your productivity and save you countless business hours.
Top Differences between Gorgias & Help Scout
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.
Help Scout, although one of the top 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).
Ecommerce Viability: Gorgias ✅ | Help Scout ❌
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, Help Scout doesn’t work that well. Its integration with Shopify is very surface-level – you can view customer details and last orders but you can’t modify orders from the dashboard and nor does it direct you to the correct link on Shopify (which DelightChat does).
Shopify Integration: Gorgias ✅ | Help Scout ❌
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. On Help Scout, you can manage support on live chat & email, but they don’t have direct FB/IG integration, which puts them at a disadvantage.
Ecommerce Tool 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 you might use to run your ecommerce business. Yotpo, Klaviyo, Postscript, Channel Reply, and pretty much any tool you can think of - Gorgias has got you covered.
Even though Help Scout commands over 30 integrations, it still lacks relevant integrations, i.e., tools that ecommerce brands use daily.
Integrations: Gorgias ✅ | Help Scout ❌
Query Intent Detection
Anything 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 comes with a sentiment detection feature that uses machine learning to detect 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 Help Scout, you can create rule-based workflows based on if-then-when conditions, but it doesn’t auto-detect the customer query’s intent.
Query Intent detection: Gorgias ✅ | Help Scout ❌
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.
Help Scout 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 ✅ | Help Scout ❌
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.
Although Help Scout integrates with all of these platforms except BigCommerce, the integrations are very rudimentary and aren’t as deep as Gorgias’ integration with Shopify.
Knowledge Base
A knowledge base on your website helps your customers quickly find answers they’re looking for without contacting customer service.
Help Scout comes equipped with a knowledge base feature where you could add all the necessary FAQ questions that your customers ask regularly.
Gorgias is at a loss here as it doesn’t have this feature, but you can integrate Gorgias with Helpdocs, a knowledge base software.
Help Center Page: Help Scout ✅ | Gorgias ❌
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.
While Gorgias has an established reminder system, Help Scout falls behind.
Reminders: Gorgias ✅ | Help Scout ❌
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.
Help Scout comes with three plans. The lowest one starts at $25/month/user that provides 3 mailboxes and 1 doc site (i.e., knowledgebase).
If you’re just starting, we’d recommend Help Scout as it’s fairly cheaper with one user. But if you’re looking for a tool with tight integration with Shopify, you need a tool like Gorgias or DelightChat.
Top Similarities between Gorgias & Help Scout
Just knowing the differences isn’t enough. Hence, we added a section where you can also check out the similarities – this can add more context to your decision-making process and see what floats your boat.
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 (aka canned responses) can help answer these recurring questions. Macros are premade responses you can create to resolve your customer queries faster.
Fortunately, both Gorgias & Help Scout support macros to help your customer support agents save time and increase productivity.
Multi-brand Support
You may be running more than one Shopify brand. But isn’t it a hassle to manage separate customer service account logins? You need to open multiple browser windows just to manage it.
Luckily, both Gorgias and Help Scout has multi-tenant capabilities – you can add more than one account to the same login; no need to hover between tabs just to answer a support question.
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 Help Scout.
Access Customer Info
As a support rep, you know it’s super helpful to have the customer information handy while replying to a query.
Luckily, both Gorgias & Help Scout comes equipped with this feature. You can see the customer’s name, email address, order id, and a bunch of other information right on the screen. You can simply refer to that information and reply with proper context.
In-depth Reporting
When it comes to Reporting, both Gorgias & Help Scout excel at it. Both tools let you check response times, customer satisfaction score, macros report, and the lot. You can find more information here:
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 help a customer.
Thankfully for us, both Gorgias & Help Scout comes with mobile apps for Android & iOS. This will help you respond to your customers – anytime, anywhere.
Customer Reviews
Gorgias Customer Reviews
The Good Ones:
“We were looking for a chat that was able to expand to support multiple channels & brands, and we found that with GORGIAS!”
“Gorgias customer service is above and beyond the standard tech experience; they are awesome to work with!”
“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.”
The Bad Ones:
“It does not work on Firefox. Secondly, when you try to access the app through the Shopify window, it takes you to a "sign up new account" window, which is a useless loop. You then find your way to your support tickets, but cannot find the settings from there. “
“I can’t comment on the software itself because I can’t get past the horrific customer support. Getting any help from Gorgias is like pulling teeth. They have zero regard for their customers’ time.”
“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. Integrity issues with the management, not keeping their word on pricing strategies.”
Help Scout Customer Reviews
The Good Ones:
"It's your best solution on the market if you are looking to interact with your customers only via email. Easy to implement and the CS is really helpful too."
"For any business, customer satisfaction is crucial. Help Scout is the tool to make it fun and easy."
"There are some minor things that I'd be happy if help scout improves upon, but otherwise I'm very happy with them."
The Bad Ones:
"The original automated format would change tickets for me and on my first tries, I ended up responding to the wrong tickets or closing the wrong tickets."
"I found it confusing at first because I didn't know where the closed messages were going, and I was nervous about closing messages, that they would disappear. But it just took some learning."
"The lack of integrations. They just rolled out with a Salesforce integration, but lack integrations in other areas."
Common FAQs
1. If I just started my ecommerce store, should I go with Gorgias or Help Scout?
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 small-to-midsize ecommerce & DTC brands.
2. I need a live chat for my site. Which one should I go for?
Although both Gorgias & Help Scout 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 Help Scout by myself or do I need external help?
Yes, both Gorgias & Help Scout 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 better options but at an affordable cost?
Gorgias and Help Scout 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.
Help Scout 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 doesn’t break your bank.
Our mission is to empower small-to-midsize 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.
