A whopping 95 percent of consumers say that customer service is vital for brand loyalty.
Strongly tied to brand loyalty is stellar customer service, which can help you increase your revenue and build a more 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 the two leading ecommerce customer service software in the market, i.e., Gorgias & Intercom. Read through the article to understand their strengths and shortcomings and find the tool best suited for your needs.
Both Gorgias and Intercom rival in features, and both have thousands of customers worldwide using the tool to manage their customer service. If you’re choosing between them, you’re already on the right track.
We also understand that they are our competitors, and so we have taken the utmost care to provide our readers with an unbiased 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.
Intercom on the other hand is a Conversational Relationship Platform (CRP). You can use it to build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences across the customer journey. You can use Intercom to deliver conversational customer experiences through chat, bots, and personalized messaging.
Top Differences Between Gorgias and Intercom
Alright, let’s move on to specifics. I’ll walk you through the top areas where Gorgias & Intercom differ in capabilities and functionality.
Ecommerce Viability
If you run an ecommerce store, choosing a random customer support tool is counterintuitive. You need a tool that is designed with the needs of ecommerce businesses in mind.
Gorgias is built for ecommerce and integrates 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.
Intercom, although a leading customer service software, isn’t specifically designed for ecommerce businesses. It syncs customer data and allows you to track users' actions in the store. However, you will not be able to modify orders directly from the app.
Ecommerce viability: Gorgias ✅ | Intercom ❌
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 WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace & Magento.
As you can see in the above table, Gorgias supports Shopify, Magento & BigCommerce but doesn’t support Magento & Squarespace.
On the other hand, Intercom supports Shopify, WooCommerce, and Squarespace. However, it doesn’t have integrations with Magento and BigCommerce.
Shopify Integration
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, Intercom doesn’t work that well. Its integration with Shopify is very surface-level – you can view customer details and user actions but you can’t modify orders from the dashboard.
Shopify Integration: Gorgias ✅ | Integration ❌
Self-service support
Gorgias comes with advanced machine learning that detects the intents and sentiments of each message. While this will help you categorize tickets based on what they're about, they will still need human intervention.
Intercom, on the other hand, has a robust self-service support layer. Not only can you share relevant answers and help center articles as customers are typing but you can also use bots designed to reduce repetitive questions. Additionally, you can create custom bots that collect up-front information, help prioritize urgent issues, and connect customers to the right people on your team.
With the ability to automatically resolve repetitive questions with chatbots & help articles, Intercom is the clear winner in this department.
Self-service support: Gorgias ❌ | Intercom ✅
Knowledge Base
With Intercom, you can set up one central place for your customers to reliably find answers, tips, and other important info when they need it. Moreover, you can use their editor to add images, videos, call-to-action-buttons, and interactive guides to your articles. Plus you can do so in multiple languages,
Gorgias is at a loss here as it doesn’t have this feature, but you can integrate Gorgias with Helpdocs, a knowledge base software.
Knowledge Base: Gorgias ❌ | Intercom ✅
Support Channels
Customers might reach out to you from a variety of channels. And you want to be able to respond to conversations across channels from one single dashboard.
With Gorgias, you can manage support on live chat, email, Facebook & Instagram.
Whereas on Intercom, you can manage support on live chat, email, Facebook & Twitter.
Pricing
Gorgias comes with four pricing 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.
Intercom’s pricing is extremely confusing, to say the least. There are opportunities for demos across their plans. So we recommend identifying the plan with the features you need and requesting a demo to find out exactly how much it’ll cost you.
Their pricing starts at $59/month for a bare-bones version and goes up to over $499/mo for their most robust offerings. Intercom users pricing is also incorporated into the tiers, with the number of allowable users increasing as the price level does.
Top Similarities Between Gorgias and Intercom
Just knowing the differences isn’t enough to make an informed decision, is it? So, let’s look at some of the features that are common to both Gorgias & Intercom.
Shared Inbox
The main purpose of a support tool is to allow the entire support team to log in and respond to customer conversations across channels simultaneously. You can do that with both Gorgias and Intercom. Both the tools also work well to make internal communication possible with the help of Slack integration.
However, we've noticed that even though all the support channels were integrated into one, teams had to get back to their collaboration tools to ask for help or share ticket information.
To solve this problem, DelightChat has built-in internal communication so your team can tag and talk to team members without ever having to leave the customer conversation screen!
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 can help answer these recurring questions. Macros are premade responses you can create to resolve your customer queries faster.
Fortunately, both Gorgias & Intercom support macros to help your customers save time and increase productivity. You can also insert a macro to a rule (say, if they ask to cancel an order); that helps you save time even more.
Automation
Both Gorgias and Intercom let you automate your team’s workflows for optimum efficiency and to ensure your customers get the best experience possible.
You can do this by setting rules to do things like automatically assign, close & tag conversations, mark conversations as priority etc.
Internal collaboration
Collaboration is an integral part of effective support. And features like ticket assignment, private notes, mentions, and tags help you do just that.
In addition to all of the above, you can create separate inboxes for different teams and set user roles & permissions on both Gorgias and Intercom.
Integrations
You want to be able to seamlessly integrate the existing tools you use with the ecommerce helpdesk solution you choose. And that's possible on both Gorgias and Intercom.
Gorgias has around 30 integrations. While Intercom has more than 250. But numbers alone don't paint the whole story. Since Gorgias is built specifically for ecommerce, all their integrations will be extremely relevant to your business. It's also worth noting that since Intercom has an Open API you can easily integrate it with your own product, tech stack, or other tools.
You can find the entire list of integrations for Gorgias here. And for Intercom, the integrations can be found here.
Multi-store Connections
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.
Well you don’t have to worry about it with either Gorgias or Intercom as they support multi-store connections. It means that no matter how many Shopify stores you have, you can manage support for all of them from a single place.
Reporting
When it comes to Reporting, both Gorgias & Intercom excel at it. Both tools let you check response times, resolution times, customer satisfaction score, macros report, and the lot. You can find more information here:
Mobile application
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 make a sale or to delight an existing customer.
Thankfully, both Gorgias & Intercom come with mobile apps for Android & iOS. This will help you respond to your customers on the go.
Customer Reviews
Real Customer Reviews: Gorgias
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!” - Gent.One
“Gorgias customer service is above and beyond the standard tech experience, they are awesome to work with!” - Sash Bag
“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.” - Simple Pledge
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. “ - Verified Shungite
“Absolutely rubbish, difficult to set up and impossible to uninstall! Tried to contact Gorgias through their chat bot and no response, and what are those videos about? seriously high school standard- I was embarrassed watching them” - ZANZI Beauty
“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.” - The Enhanced Male
Real Customer Reviews: Intercom
The good ones
"In short, I love Intercom. Combined with my WordPress website, it has revolutionized my customer service. It's very easy to use for both the end user and me as an admin, yet so powerful. It's just fun to work with - even on the go!" - Leopold S
"Intercom is industry standard messaging and customer success tool offering variety of automation and easy to use tool for our agents." - Boris.B
"I used intercom daily so came to know it inside and out. I found the experience very easy to navigate and could utilise their inbuilt tools to reduce more time to reply. I also really liked their automation components." - Jack. O
The bad ones
"They lure companies in to integrating intercom into the workflows and take advantage of the difficulty of later migrating to another product, in order to jack up the prices to ridiculous levels." - Guy. Z
"Lacks basic/rudimentary functionality. Simple things like auto triggering a message at the company level when specific criteria is met is not possible. Tagging system is not easy to use and lacks basic features. Can't customize inboxes as needed." - Tasha.D
"Nothing - never worked right, confusing interface, balky software, poor support team" - Ryan.M
Common FAQs
1. If I just started my ecommerce store, should I go with Gorgias or Intercom?
Both Gorgias & Intercom are equipped with most of the features to help you manage your store’s customer service. However, since Gorgias is built specifically for ecommerce you may find it to be better suited to your needs.
But both the tools are targeted at enterprises, and their best features are reserved for the expensive plans. So you could consider taking advantage of DelightChat, an ecommerce helpdesk solution built for SME ecommerce & DTC brands.
2. I need a live chat for my site. Which one should I go for?
Both Gorgias & Intercom allow you to add a live chat. However, if this is the primary feature you’re looking for in an ecommerce helpdesk, Intercom might be a better option since you can create custom bots and do things like showing relevant knowledge base articles directly from their messenger.
3. Can I set up Gorgias and Intercom by myself without any help?
Yes, both Gorgias & Intercom have got extensive documentation for the complicated stuff (if any). Some plans also come with a dedicated account manager who’ll help set it up for you. Plus, there are enough tutorials on YouTube that help you set up either of the software for your ecommerce store.
4.How much does Gorgias cost?
Gorgias starts at $60/month for 350 tickets + $25 for every additional 100 tickets. The price of additional tickets goes down as you upgrade to higher plans. You may want to check out a complete breakdown of all Gorgias pricing plans to help you choose the best one.
5.How much does Intercom cost?
Intercom’s pricing starts at $59/month for a bare-bones version and goes up to over $499/mo for their most robust offerings. Intercom users pricing is also incorporated into the tiers, with the number of allowable users increasing as the price level does.
Don’t like either of them?
Gorgias and Intercom aren’t the only great support tools for your ecommerce store.
While Gorgias is excellent at supporting multiple ecommerce platforms & other useful features like replying to posts & ad comments & the vast array of integrations, it doesn’t support WooCommerce, which accounts for 32% of ecommerce stores on the internet.
Intercom, on the other hand, is a great tool to build powerful chatbots and create self-serve articles. However, since it’s not built for ecommerce, the lack of deep Shopify integration could be a deal-breaker.
Lastly, they’re both not the easiest to figure out and have pricing plans that might be too expensive for some stores, especially ones smaller sized or earlier in their journey.
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 or Messenger, only more powerful).
- It comes equipped with all the powerful features an ecommerce brand can expect.
- It is fairly cheap so that it doesn’t burn a hole in your wallet.
Our mission is to empower SME 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.
And in case you want to learn how DelightChat is different from Gorgias & Intercom, you can refer to the comparison pages here & here.
