Do you want to streamline your customer support team and keep them motivated for high productivity and perfection while catering to customers?
For that, you need robust and feature-rich customer support software that keeps your business’s reputation and trust. Today, two giant software are ready to knock each other out – yes, we’ll compare Freshdesk and Gorgias.
Yes, it was a close one, and even our experts took a lot of time to finalize the winner between the two.
In this Freshdesk vs. Gorgias comparison, we’ve thrown light on a total of 10 factors and, each time, showed which one the winner is. Not just that, we’ve also introduced you to a better alternative for eCommerce businesses to both of these.
Are you ready?
Key Takeaway :
Freshdesk and Gorgias are both good options for customer support software, but the better value for money depends on your specific needs. Freshdesk is a versatile, user-friendly tool that can support businesses of any size, while Gorgias is designed for e-commerce platforms and offers powerful automation and macro functionalities. Ultimately, the decision between the two will depend on factors such as e-commerce viability, auto responses, automated follow-ups, combining customer queries from multiple channels, artificial intelligence assistance, reporting and SLA management, gamified help desk dashboard, pricing, knowledge base, and WhatsApp support.
What is Gorgias
Gorgias is a powerful help desk software to improve your support processes. It is designed while keeping e-commerce platforms as the focus. So you can easily integrate it with popular e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Woocommerce, and Magento.
To create a centralized dashboard, Gorgias unifies customer interactions from different platforms, such as chat, email, or social media sites. As a result, support agents can easily manage inquiries from different platforms in a single place.
Gorgias comes with powerful automation and Macro functionalities. Therefore, you can automate repeating tasks and quickly reply to common queries. This will drastically lower your response times while solving customer queries more effectively.
By integrating Gorgias with e-commerce platforms, your support agents can get customer details, interaction history, and order details to give a more personalized experience. Sometimes, you may need to solve urgent queries faster. Therefore, Gorgias allows you to customize ticketing systems so you can categorize and prioritize tickets as per urgency or customer type.
Its data-driven approach takes advantage of customer’s analytics and insights so your businesses can make better decisions and improve support operations further. Gorgias becomes an excellent choice if you want to improve the overall customer experience. It also comes with a suite of collaboration tools, performance analytics, and a knowledge base integration.
What is Freshdesk?
Freshdesk comes with a complete set of tools to optimize your customer interactions.
So, If you are looking for a versatile, user-friendly tool, it is a good option. Moreover, it can support businesses of any size, from small startups to large enterprises.
It also allows you to unify customer inquiries from different communication channels such as email, phone, chat and social media. The interface is also very easy to get used to, so you can handle tickets efficiently, solve customer inquiries, and provide top-notch service to your customers.
When you switch to Freshdesk you will have to never worry about missing important messages because of a cluttered workflow with multiple apps running, as it creates a unified workflow by combining multiple communication channels.
Freshdesk comes with automation capabilities for ticket routing, scenario automation, and canned responses to make your support process more efficient. There are also tools for collaboration, so your teams can work together and share insights.
Freshdesk will prioritize and categorize customer queries for you so you can have a more organized work experience when interacting with customers. If any customers want self-service options, then Freshdesk has got you covered with its powerful knowledge base and helpful community forums.
To provide you with crucial info about customer satisfaction and your support performance, Freshdesk adds analytics and reporting features so you can use that data to make key decisions for your business’s improvement and growth.
Also read: How to Choose Best OMS Software for eCommerce
Desku as an alternative
If you are tired of traditional help desk software and looking for an alternative, then Desku can be a very strong contender that simplifies your customer support process. Desku has managed to create a stronghold in the current help desk market with its intuitive interface and powerful set of features.
Desku helps you manage your support operations more efficiently, with seamless communication across different channels. Because of the user-friendly design of Desku, your new support agents can easily adapt without much training.
Desku has a well-equipped ticketing system, which allows you to prioritize and categorize customer tickets so your support teams can quickly solve critical issues. Moreover, you can automate repetitive tasks with Desku’s strong automation capabilities so your support teams can focus on handling more complex issues.
One of the clearest self-serving conveniences in Desku is empowering customers to find their answers independently through the knowledge base. For example, the platform’s analytics and reporting capabilities provide real-time insight into support performance, which helps businesses make informed decisions for ongoing improvement.
Ideally, Desku serves as an appropriate substitute that could be appraised for its simplicity and value to businesses looking for minimal customer support solutions.
Key features of Gorgias
- Multichannel Support: Gorgias makes it easy for you to handle customer queries by creating a centralized dashboard from different communication channels like chat, email, social media, and more.
- Integration with E-commerce Platforms: Gorgias integrates smoothly with many popular e-commerce sites to provide your support agents with crucial data such as order details, customer information, and interaction history. With this data, your support team is all set to give a more personalized response to customers.
- Automation and Macros: In Gorgias, you can easily automate various repetitive tasks with the help of automation tools and Macros. So your customer can get quicker responses for common and repetitive queries.
- Customizable Ticketing System: This very useful feature will help you divide tickets into various categories and prioritize them based on factors such as urgency and customer type. This will allow your support agents to solve issues more effectively.
- Knowledge Base Integration: With Gorgias, you can incorporate a knowledge base with a helpdesk to give self-service options to your customers. So they can find answers to simple questions themselves. It will help you to lessen the burden on your support teams by reducing the sheer volume of tickets.
- Customer Insights and Data: Gorgias combines customer data and interactions so your support team can study various data such as customer behavior, past interactions and preferences. And create more informed and personalized solutions.
- Collaboration Tools: Gorgias allows support agents to share important info by placing internal notes and comments on tickets. This will keep your entire support team informed about current customer issues and work together to provide better solutions.
- Performance Analytics: With Gorgias’s powerful reporting and analytics features, you can easily track performance metrics, customer satisfaction and agent productivity. You can continuously improve your support operations.
Key features of Freshdesk
- Ticketing System: Freshdesk provides you with a centralized ticketing system to automate various features such as ticket creation, categorizing tickets, and assigning them for quick resolutions.
- Multichannel Support: Freshdesk allows you to integrate and handle customer interactions from multiple services such as email, phone, social media and chat.
- Knowledge Base: If you want to enable your customers to find solutions to certain simple issues by themselves. Freshdesk gives you the ability to make a self-service knowledge base with FAQs and Articles.
- Automation and AI: Freshdesk comes with AI-powered automation tools to organize repetitive tasks and achieve lower response times.
- Service Level Agreements (SLAs): You Can set and manage SLAs to make sure that customer issues are solved on time and that overall service quality is improved.
- Customer Satisfaction Surveys: With these surveys, you can get feedback from your customers about the quality of your services and improve them further.
- Collaboration Tools: With various collaboration tools such as tem inbox and shared ownership, your support team can collaborate among themselves.
- Mobile Accessibility: If you want to manage your support tickets on a mobile device, then Freshdesk has a mobile-friendly UI for your customers and service agents.
- Performance Analytics: You can use analytics and reporting tools to measure the progress of your support team’s performance, look for trends and then make various improvements based on this data.
- Social Listening: With Freshdesk, you can keep an eye on customer feedback and quickly reply to social media mentions of your brand. It’s like being directly connected to your customers.
- Integration Capabilities: Freshdesk can smoothly integrate with various third-party apps, CRM systems and other tools to get more functionalities.
Gorgias vs FreshDesk: Top Differences
1). E-commerce Viability: Winner – Gorgias
If you are running an e-commerce store, then any random customer support tool is not going to cut it, so you need a tool made for e-commerce use.
Gorgias is made for e-commerce purposes, and if you are going to use Shopify, it integrates very deeply with it. So you can cancel, edit or return an order without leaving Gorgias dashboard.
Freshdesk is also a popular customer service software, But it’s not designed for e-commerce purposes. But, If you want to integrate with Shopify, you can do so through third-party apps.
You can also cancel, edit and return orders similar to Gorgias. But unlike Gorgias, you can not directly pull data from Shopify during customer interactions. So, it will add an extra step for your support agents.
You can also use DelightChat to pull customer info from shopify and automatically fill order details based on canned templates. Moreover, you can also work on orders on the same screen as Shopify.
2). Auto responses: Winner – Gorgias
It’s not always possible to give responses in an instant or quickly. Your agents will not be free every time, especially when it’s buying season, so responding to customers will be delayed.
One thing you can do to reduce delay is to create automated responses for your customers.
Gorgias can help find the reason behind a query and answer appropriately. Most of the time, customers are asking about common questions such as pricing, discounts, order tracking, refund policy shipment info, etc.
Now, you can set rules to check if a query is based on such a question, and if it is, then the tool will send a personalized response to the customer. Freshdesk also provides this service, but its customizability is far from what Gorgias offers.
It allows you to create responses based on the time of the day or support channel they came from, but it’s not possible to customize responses with individual variables like Gorgias. You can also use DelightChat; it has a fast replies function, which permits the creation of response templates with specific variables.
When a customer request comes, you can give faster replies by simply selecting the template and details of customers will be filled automatically when you add variables. DelightChat also integrates with Shopify, so order info will be available without leaving the app.
3). Automated follow-ups: Winner – Freshdesk
Tracking the follow-ups is hard while your team is drowning in new customer messages. But it isn’t optional either. If no response is received within a short duration, then it becomes necessary to follow up afterward. This builds trust and confidence in your brand.
The supervisor feature, one of the company’s solutions for rule-based automation, is a great option that sees you create automatic follow-up emails. Here, you can add hours before a follow-up email and ticket status and narrow down to nail the automation.
You get excellent automation capabilities with Gorgias while the conversation is ongoing. However, automating follow-up messages or emails is absent.
4). Combining customer queries from multiple channels: Winner – Gorgias
Sometimes, one customer sends the same message from multiple support channels.
Now, Freshdesk creates a different ticket every time it happens. This will create difficulty for your support agents to find out if a query has already been answered with a different support channel, so more time is not spent on the same thing twice. And customers also don’t have to repeat everything again.
On the other hand, Gorgias handles customer history by combining messages of a particular customer from different support platforms into a single one. So, if another agent takes over next time, they can easily go through the entire history of interaction in a single place without looking here and there. This will also create a good image of your company in front of customers.
5). Artificial intelligence assistance: Winner – Freshdesk
AI assistance can come in handy to reduce the manual work of employees when you get a lot of queries from social media like Twitter.
With Freshdesk’s AI functionalities, it analyzes and prioritizes tweets so important mentions come first. This enables your support agents to work on important queries rather than going through all of them.
Gorgias doesn’t provide such features right now. But, you can use rule-based automation to find the reason behind a query by specific words, then organize them with tags.
6). Reporting and SLA management: Winner – Both
Robust SLA management is critical to support team growth. Freshdesk scores here. Though Freshdesk isn’t a dedicated product only for Shopify users, it provides robust reporting capabilities.
Conversely, reporting and analytics are also found on Gorgias. However, Freshdesk allows you to handle your SLAs by directly indicating your response times and query resolution times from the Dashboard.
When it comes to reporting, any of the tools will suffice. Freshdesk is great, but only for the additional SLA management feature.
7). Gamified Help Desk Dashboard: Winner – Freshdesk
Working in support operations is good at the beginning, but after some time, it becomes monotonous. So many SaaS companies brought a new concept in their tools called Gamification.
Once You start playing a game, you can’t put down the controller. It gives you rewards for small achievements to keep you hooked.
Freshdesk has also used this idea of Gamification in its design So support agents can enjoy the work. This principle is very simple, as administrators will create levels that give points to support agents at completion.
Completing simple tasks like “make an FAQ” or “Solve first ticket” offers rewards that are available on the Dashboard. Agents who are accustomed to this will be motivated to work to get the rewards. And this can also be a good way to give incentives in exchange for points.
Sadly, Gorgias doesn’t offer Gamification in their tool.
8). Pricing: Winner – Both
The price of these tools must fit your budget. Otherwise, a costly tool will not give you a good return on your investment. Let’s compare the pricing of Gorgias vs Freshdesk.
Gorgias charges you based on your ticket volume and customer conversations. The benefit of this kind of structure is that you can add as many agents as you want. Therefore, if it’s not peak season and your monthly tickets are very few, then this plan will be a better option.
Whereas Freshdesk follows the price-per-agent structure. If you are just getting started with your support operations, then the free plan is good for you. But, if you want automation and other features we discussed above, you will have to go with a paid option.
On a side note, DelightChat Charges users based on the volume of their unique customer conversations for the month. And if you are a Shopify user, then this is a great alternative.
If your monthly customer conversations are low, then you should go with Gorgias. However, if you have few support agents but have lots of customer interactions, then FreshDesk is a better option.
Also, if you’re still confused and want the best of both, then you can go with Desku for your Shopify store. It leaves no grounds for disappointment in terms of customer satisfaction, and you will be impressed with its features & reasonable pricing. There are some features where Desku dominates in terms of overall performance in comparison to both Freshdesk and Gorgias.
9). Knowledge Base: Winner – Freshdesk
Your knowledge base on the website allows your customers to get the answers they are looking for without needing to contact your customer service.
Also, Freshdesk has a knowledge base feature that contains all the FAQ questions that would be often asked by customers or should be questioned in some specific situations.
Gorgias is helpless in this regard because it does not have a built-in feature. However, you can combine Gorgias with Helpdocs, a knowledge base software for e-commerce companies. The only catch is that you have to spend even more on the expensive tools you integrate with.
10). WhatsApp support: Winner – Freshdesk
WhatsApp has become the new standard for messaging. Therefore, many users find getting customer support on this platform convenient. Your help desk solution needs to have support for WhatsApp.
Freshdesk has support for WhatsApp API, so you can chat with customers right from its Dashboard. Gorgias doesn’t have WhatsApp integration right now, as it’s in the development phase right now. Therefore, if you want to receive customer queries via WhatsApp, then you’ll have to use an extra tool alongside Gorgias.
Also note that API access costs will be extra, as you need to pay both Whatsapp and API providers for templated messages. For your API provider, you can go with DelighChat as it has complete WhatsApp API integration, So it becomes a two-in-one solution for WhatsApp marketing and customer support.
Conclusion
This way, both Gorgias and Freshdesk prove to be good software for your customer service team, but if you believe in going with the best live chat software (even better than Zendesk), then check out Desku, a perfect fit for businesses of all sizes! With the industry’s best user reviews and ratings, Desku strives to bring you a huge bundle of features at an unbelievably low cost! Check pricing now!
