Keeping up with customer demands and support tickets can be hard if you're trying to grow a small business. It can often be one of the most daunting hurdles to overcome for a lot of business owners and customer support managers.
Failing to respond to customer inquiries quickly and effectively can hurt your ability to create repeat customers, which can make it difficult to build a strong brand in the long term.
Luckily, there are a handful of excellent customer support tools out there that can help streamline the process and make it easier to manage a sea of incoming requests.
The only problem is that it can be tough to know which tool makes the most sense for your business. And if you're asking yourself, "should I use Gorgias or Kustomer?", it shows you care about providing a great customer experience — it means you're on the right path.
When deciding which customer support software platform to use, it’s important to weigh the different features and benefits of each option. Gorgias and Kustomer are both great platforms to get started with. However, in this article, we'll also introduce Chatdesk as an add-on that can seriously help supercharge your customer support efforts — regardless of if you go with either Kustomer or Gorgias.
But before we dive into the differences and similarities between Gorgias vs Kustomer, let's first talk about what you should be on the lookout for when making a final decision.
When it comes to selecting the right customer support software, there are several key factors to consider.
First, think about what features you need. You should ask yourself:
Knowing the answer to these questions will help you focus on the main features you need.
Second, price can be an important factor to consider. Before making a final decision, take a look at the cost of each option and make sure it fits in your budget — we'll go through this together as we compare each of our solutions.
Finally, don’t forget to look at customer reviews and ratings. How satisfied are customers who are already using the platform? Have customers had any issues or difficulties with the service? Understanding how existing customers feel about a particular product is a great way to get a better understanding of how well it will work for you.
Now that we’ve discussed what to keep in mind when selecting a customer support platform, let’s dive into Gorgias, Kustomer, and Chatdesk and see how they compare.
Founded in 2015, Gorgias has quickly become a go-to choice for many ecommerce stores looking for a chatbot service. But over the years, the platform has become more than just a chatbot.
Gorgias gives you the ability to centralize all of your support tickets in one place, whether it's through chat, email, voice, social media, and even SMS.
Gorgias is a feature-rich customer support platform. You can do everything from automation to support ticket management — all in one place.
Here are some of the key benefits of using Gorgias:
Okay, let's get into how much Gorgias is going to run you.
Like many customer support tools, Gorgias offers a pricing model that scales with you. If you want the absolute basic plan they have, it will run you about $10/month. This Starter plan will give you 50 tickets a month (+ $0.40 per extra ticket), 3 user seats, 2 social media channels, and limited integrations.
It's a pretty cost-effecting offering for most small businesses looking to kickstart their ecommerce customer service operation.
Here are a few key differences between their plans:
The prices listed above all assume you're paying month-to-month.
A small discount is added if you decide to go with an annual plan and pay for the entire year upfront. And if you need more than 5,000 tickets per month, they have custom pricing for that as well.
If you want to check out all of their pricing options in greater detail, be sure to check out Gorgias' pricing page.
Based on Gorgais' features, pricing model, and existing customers, it's apparent that this platform is best for small to medium-sized ecommerce brands.
Gorgias doesn't seem like the best option if you're a service-based company or a SaaS company. But if you're a DTC ecommerce brand, this is a great customer service solution to get started with.
Just like Gorgias, Kustomer was founded in 2015 with the mission to help customer service teams deliver faster and more consistent responses to incoming support inquiries.
However, unlike Gorgias, Kustomer markets itself as a CRM that lets you unify all of your CX operations in one place — making it an attractive solution for larger companies with multiple support agents.
Kustomer, now a Meta company, boasts a lot of the same features as Gorgias. However, what makes Kustomer different is that all of their plans come with unlimited conversations. You're not limited to the ticket-based pricing model of Gorgias.
Besides the pricing structure, Kustomer has some great benefits like:
Okay, let's get into how much Kustomer is going to run you.
As mentioned earlier, all of Kustomer's plans come with unlimited conversations — giving it an advantage over some other customer service platforms.
However, because this is such a strong feature, it means that even Kustomer's basic plan is going to run you a bit more than Gorgias' basic plan.
Kustomer's starting plan is their “Professional” plan, and this will run you about $29/month. It's a pretty sweet deal for unlimited conversations across email, SMS, chat, and social, as well as other features like a knowledge base for internal notes and standard reporting.
Here are a few key differences between their plans:
Unlike Gorgias, Kustomer does not have an annual discount on their plans (at the moment). So the price you see is the price you pay on a month-to-month basis.
If you want to check out these plans in more depth, be sure to head over to Kustomer's pricing page.
Kustomer is great for medium to large-sized ecommerce businesses, fintech companies, travel companies, and marketplaces.
If you're a small ecommerce website, it might make sense to start with something like Gorgias. But if you're not specifically an ecommerce company, or you're scaling towards becoming a large company, Kustomer is definitely a platform to check out.
Founded in 2016, Chatdesk is the leader in outsourcing your customer service operations to US-based agents.
Whether you're an ecommerce business, SaaS company, e-learning platform, travel company, or marketplace, Chatdesk is a great solution for companies big and small looking to get help with their support operations.
Even though this article is mainly comparing the differences between Gorgias and Kustomer, we decided to add Chatdesk because it can actually integrate with both platforms.
A tool like Gorgias or Kustomer is important to have because it sets the foundations for your customer success team — you need a chatbot on your website and a place that can route all of your support tickets in one place.
But what many of these customer support tools fail to do is actually help you scale a customer support team.
This is where Chatdesk comes into play. Chatdesk gives you access to an unlimited number of US-based support agents that work diligently to understand your brand voice and products/services.
So, as you scale, if you need a cost-effective way to scale up and down your support agents at any given moment, you should definitely book a free demo with Chatdesk to see what it can do for your team.
Hundreds of companies, from ecommerce brands to fintech companies, use Chatdesk to supercharge their support efforts — and with good reason.
What makes Chatdesk so unique compared to other outsourcing platforms is that Chatdesk has a suite of analytics tools that aggravate support tickets and help you uncover trends across all of your customer-facing touchpoints.
This means agents will be able to respond to support tickets not just via email, SMS, or chat, but also on social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram.
From social media comments to social media DMs, Chatdesk agents are able to take the burden off marketing teams by answering questions on social media — helping companies operate more efficiently and open a new revenue stream from what would have otherwise been unanswered comments.
Here are a few key benefits of using Chatdesk:
Okay, let's get into how much Chatdesk will run you.
Because you're able to easily scale up and down your customer support team at any moment, Chatdesk operates on a pay-per-ticket model.
The great thing is that you can actually try Chatdesk for free — your first 2 weeks (or 100 tickets) are on us, no questions asked.
With Chatdesk's free pilot, you'll get free social media support setup across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, 100% personalized on-brand support, flexible coverage hours and response times, and a complimentary voice and customer analysis.
Here are some of the key differences between Chatdesk's main plans:
If you need more than 2,000 tickets a month there are also custom packages that can be tailored to your needs.
Chatdesk also has some other plans for features like Call Deflection and Customer Insights, so be sure to check out the pricing page for more details.
There are tons of standard help desk software available today, but making sure you find the right one that fits your needs is key to creating a great customer experience.
A great experience leads to a happy customer. And a happy customer leads to a healthy brand.
So it’s important to streamline your support workflows, have ways to analyze your customer data, and have an omnichannel approach to your customer service operations — all of these give you insights to optimize your customer experience.
In conclusion, if you’re a small ecommerce company, going with Gorgias probably makes the most sense. If you’re a medium to large-sized company, ecommerce or not, Kustomer might be a good option to look into.
There are some other tools like Zendesk and Freshdesk as well. So if any of these platforms still didn’t fit your needs be sure to check those out as well.
And if you decide that it’s time to get help scaling your support team, be sure to book a free call with Chatdesk!
