When you build an online store, the last thing you want is for that store to appear dead. Yet that’s exactly what people do: they go through the motions of creating an ecommerce store and then forget to provide the customer service that makes it feel “alive.”
In a world where 54% of people say they’re going to have higher customer service expectations next year than they did last year, customer service is more important than ever. But you don’t have a team capable of providing that level of customer service, especially if you’re a small business.
Enter services like Gorgias. Gorgias helps you populate an ecommerce helpdesk that provides a more organic, “someone’s here to help” feeling on your ecommerce store. Working with top platforms like Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce, it can fit neatly into an existing store and instantly upgrade the way you respond to customers.
But what if you don’t want to use Gorgias? Below, we’ve put together a list of the ten best Gorgias alternatives we could find. Not all of them function exactly like Gorgias, true. But browse through the entries below and you’ll see that there are more than enough options to transform the way you handle customer service on your website.
- Gorgias Alternative #1: Zendesk
- Gorgias Alternative #2: Help Scout
- Gorgias Alternative #3: Freshdesk
- Gorgias Alternative #4: OneDesk
- Gorgias Alternative #5: Hubspot CRM
- Gorgias Alternative #6: Kayako
- Gorgias Alternative #7: DelightChat
- Gorgias Alternative #8: Freshservice
- Gorgias Alternative #9: Richpanel
- Gorgias Alternative #10: Reamaze
Gorgias Alternative #1: Zendesk
The idea behind a service like Zendesk is simple: you set up the desk and then achieve a state of “zen” relaxing behind the scenes while the desk does all the work of handling your customers.
Of course anyone who’s ever tried installing customer support software knows it’s not that easy, but it’s a nice ideal. In Zendesk’s case, we can point to some specific features that help you achieve this state of “zen.” Of course there’s the usual helpdesk, which enables the store to put together answers to the most frequently asked questions that pop up. But we’ll also identify some other key features worth noting:
Key features:
- Robust live chat features. You can handle live chat, of course, but you can also reach out to customers via messaging, social media, email, and more. This gives you plenty of avenues to reach out and more immediately respond to customer requests, which is an increasing concern for customers these days.
- Build a help desk and community forum. Since building a Gorgias alternative is all about delivering on an ecommerce support desk that people will actually like using, the community forum is a key feature here. It lets your users interact with each other and share what they’ve learned, which in turn removes the need for your team to constantly interact.
Gorgias Alternative #2: Help Scout
Help Scout is a Gorgias alternative that works well for companies that have a small customer service team, especially a remote customer service team that needs to stay unified. While they offer the typical features (like a knowledge base that customers can use), Help Scout also provides a shared inbox so any of your customer support remote workers can log in, check the latest queue, and immediately jump in to help people.
Given that 12% of Americans rate their number one frustration with customer support as lack of speed, this is a key point. Any Gorgias alternative that is going to help your company make sales needs to give your store the ability to reach out to customers and answer their problems in a hurry.
Key features:
- Knowledge base. This is their equivalent of a help desk. Building a strong knowledge base will help you eliminate a good percentage of the incoming customer queries you have to deal with. In turn, this can reduce the amount of time your team spends updating customers on the most frequently asked questions they pose.
- Mailboxes. One of the best ways to make sure that customers get their questions answered quickly? Efficient mailboxes. Help Scout’s mailbox features make it easy to quickly assign tasks to specific customer support professionals and delegate.
Gorgias Alternative #3: Freshdesk
Freshdesk is one of those names ubiquitous in the industry. But does it stack up to the other alternatives on this list to offer the kinds of features that make it viable as a Gorgias alternative? Like Help Scout, it features a team inbox that makes it possible for you to “herd cats,” metaphorically speaking, and get a remote team capable of responding to customer inquiries with ease.
But there are also unusual features that help make Freshdesk seem like a viable alternative. For example, its “agent collision” feature is key in making sure that two of your customer support agents aren’t working on the same problem. The result: you can put together an online store and use Freshdesk to create an efficient customer service interface that’s seamless on both ends.
Key features:
- Automation. This is a big category of features, so let’s get specific. What can you automate? One noteworthy automation feature is that Freshdesk will detect “thank you” messages from customers and help you to avoid opening up fresh tickets when all a customer wanted to do is end the conversation.
- Build your own ticket workflow. Think of this as “Choose your own adventure,” but for customer support on your ecommerce store. You can create your own ticket workflow for tagging customer tickets as they relate to stages of your customer support cycle. That’s a long-winded way of saying that you get to customize how things look on the inside.
Gorgias Alternative #4: OneDesk
With a name like OneDesk, you know it’s going to aim at robust help desk features. OneDesk advertises itself as helpdesk and project management software, which means it’s aimed at people who know they want to build a robust help desk and need to get organized to do so. If you have a growing customer base but notice that you’re having trouble keeping up with the changes going on at your online shop, this can be an ideal way to get back on track.
That isn’t to say that OneDesk is only a help desk software alternative and nothing else. In fact, it includes a ticket management system so you can be more responsive to customer issues. It also has a customer service portal so you can have a dedicated place to interact with customers, giving each customer the feeling that they’re being taken care of.
Key features:
- Automation including automatic assignment of incoming tickets so you don’t constantly have to sift through the incoming customer requests. This helps you get organizes in a hurry, which is a key theme with OneDesk: it’s great for fast-growing companies that may not have had a help desk before, but need to get set up with one as soon as possible.
- Live chat. Like other options on this list, OneDesk features live chat support. It’s also easy to follow up with an email if a customer suddenly drops off and goes offline.
Gorgias Alternative #5: Hubspot CRM
Although it advertises itself as CRM—customer relationship management—Hubspot’s CRM offering can be thought of as a sort of help desk as well. You might consider this as an incoming “sales” offering if you need to handle a pipeline of potential customers at your website, rather than a traditional customer support offering.
How does it provide that help with incoming sales leads? It ties in with email features to give you email tracking, notifications, and prospect tracking. This helps ensure that as you deal with potential customers, you don’t forget their names.
Key features:
- Email tracking and engagement notifications. You can essentially run a style of customer support even with prospects who are only potential customers, thanks to the way Hubspot CRM makes it easy to track who you’ve talked to and when.
- Live chat. The live chat features help you use Hubspot CRM more as a customer support module, which can be even more engaging when using the platform to help drive sales. Put it in the hands of sales professionals and you can create an entirely new pipeline for bringing in leads.
Gorgias Alternative #6: Kayako
With customer support features, a shared inbox, and plenty of ticketing automations to help you handle an influx of customers, Kayako is a unique alternative to Gorgias that can have your shop ready for the traffic.
The live chat feature is robust, allowing you to step in and immediately take over a customer’s problem and communicate with them in real time. You’ll also have easy access to your history with each customer, which helps even new customer support team members talking to your customers as if they’ve been with the company for a long time.
Key features:
- Mobile support. Since so many customers these days are talking to you from a mobile phone, it only makes sense if you can do the same. You can use the mobile friendly features to help connect a remote team, or simply have at it yourself when you don’t have an easy way to reach the office.
- Self-service portal. By building up a self-service portal, you can have a lot of customers avoiding the live chat so you don’t have to spend as much energy there. The result is that your website can be responsive to customers’ needs, but in a much more passive way that doesn’t require extra energy or resources.
Gorgias Alternative #7: DelightChat
The appeal is built right into the name: DelightChat aims to delight your customers by giving you as many options as possible at the point of the help desk. How does that translate into features? Consider the fact that it lets you integrate your Instagram comments into the overall infrastructure, which means that you can respond to customers on your social media accounts as if you were monitoring them 24/7. And in a sense, with DelightChat, you are.
Whether you’re talking on Facebook DMs, Instagram DMs, or simply handling customer support directly through your website, DelightChat’s goal is to maximize customer satisfaction with minimal work from your end. Let’s take a look at a few of the features they use to make that happen.
Key features:
- Multiple streams of chat. Instagram DMs, Facebook DMs, WhatsApp, on-site chat—you get the point. No matter how a customer is reaching out to you, DelightChat likely has a way for you to reach right back out, engaging your customers where they want to be heard. This also increases the speed at which you can get back to your customers.
- Connect email to the central screen. For some people, moving from live chat to customer support emails can be a bit of a pain. With DelightChat it’s easy to integrate them directly to your central screen, which provides you with a sort of one-size-fits-all dashboard for reaching out to customers on their terms.
Gorgias Alternative #8: Freshservice
With Freshservice, the emphasis is on automation and building systems that make customer service feel like it’s taking nothing out of your day. For example, its enterprise platform features AI characteristics that make it possible for you to streamline the entire customer experience, which hopefully reduces the need for customers to reach out to you in the first place.
Another key element of this approach is that you can streamline the experience when a customer reaches out to you, making it easier for your customer support agents to handle new inquiries.
Key features:
- No-code platform. The “no-code” approach of Freshservice means that you’re free to empower your own developers to handle the systems the way you want to handle them. If you have a branded shop with all sorts of unique needs, then it’s probably a good idea to take advantage of the level of customization this provides.
- Employee productivity factors. You can unite your employees on Slack in a way that integrates neatly with Freshservice, which helps eliminate the red tape and “bulk” that comes with stacking platform on top of platform as you try to build the back-end systems to respond to customers.
Gorgias Alternative #9: Richpanel
This is another platform of the CRM variety that seeks to make your communications with customers (and potential customers) as smooth as possible. What does that look like in practicality? One neat feature is how easily Richpanel unites everything into a single helpdesk, which makes it easier for you to handle all customer emails and live chat requests in a single system.
There’s also a live chat system that lets customers track their packages, for example, giving them more power. And when you empower your customers, you already do a lot to make them happy before you even talk to them.
Key features:
- Measurement. We haven’t talked a lot about measuring your success on this list of Gorgias alternatives yet, but it’s certainly a feature that warrants mentioning here. You want to make sure you know what you’re doing when it comes to customer support, and automatically sending out customer surveys will help you get a sense of what your customers are thinking about your service via Richpanel.
- Self-service portal. Any time you can reduce customer waiting times by having them resolve issues with a self-service portal is a good use of your resources. The self-service portal here is robust enough to help customers figure out everything they need to know.
Gorgias Alternative #10: Reamaze
Reamaze has one simple premise: you want to amaze your customers when they visit—every time. The question is how best to do this. From your perspective as the online shop, you’ll definitely want the system to be easy to use and functional. This makes it easier to organize your ticket requests and look at the history of each customer with ease.
But you also need customer-facing features that will “amaze” them as well. And does Reamaze deliver on those? Pricing features like unlimited email inboxes are good from your end, but it doesn’t really matter until you’re able to show the customers that you’ve invested in the systems designed to make their experience better, too.
Key features:
- Response templates. If you have frequently asked questions, one of the best ways to get back to a customer quickly is to work from a response template. This runs the risk of potentially alienating your customers; after all, they don’t want to see a form response. But since it’s so easy to create response templates in Reamaze, you may be able to create such specific ones that you can answer specific questions with ease.
- Cues, or proactive messages. One thing that many customers might hate about how companies respond to customer support inquiries? It feels like the company isn’t being proactive enough about finding solutions. If that’s the case, using the “cues” feature in Reamaze will give your business a much more proactive feeling. You’ll reach out to customers in trying to find out the source of their problem, which can lead to much less frustration.
Which is the best alternative for you? That’s up to the individual features you want to prioritize. But hopefully you’ve found enough on this list of Gorgias alternatives to convince you that when you need to get up and running, there’s no shortage of possibilities.
