Gorgias vs. Zendesk vs. Big Sur AI: Which is best in 2024?

If you're evaluating different customer support software and comparing Gorgias vs Zendesk, this buyer guide is for you.

Both platforms offer a traditional ticketing system and AI capabilities, so your customers can solve their issues with either an AI chatbot or a human.

However, many e-commerce brands seek more than a customer service chatbot with pre-built answers.

A way to help their customers during product discovery. That's why we'll introduce a third option, Big Sur AI (which is us).

As a pre-purchase chatbot, Big Sur AI can complement Gorgias and Zendesk, which lean on post-purchase customer support.

TL;DR

💡 Gorgias and Zendesk are both traditional customer support helpdesks that work via customer tickets.

They've recently incorporated AI features to help customers get quicker answers and to help your agents by providing them with unified customer views and answer prompts.

▶️ Big Sur AI is a pre-purchase AI-powered chatbot that helps you increase sales by providing your customers with an AI-assisted shopping experience.

Every feature of the product is backed by machine learning models that are optimized for conversions - from product recommendations to on-page question prompts for your customers to better understand your product.

▶️ Gorgias is the preferred platform for building an e-commerce helpdesk, excelling with its rich integrations, AI-powered chatbot resolving common problems, and automated workflows.

▶️ Zendesk may not be ideal for e-commerce stores, but the platform is one of the pound-for-pound best helpdesks on the market, offering over 1,700 integrations, analytics, and more advanced automations than Gorgias.

🎯 Big Sur AI's analytics provide insights into what products are frequently bought together, and what questions people have in their product discovery phase.

🎯 On the other hand, Zendesk and Gorgias' analytics monitor agent performance and outstanding tickets and provide an overview of customer satisfaction rates.

Both Gorgias And Zendesk Offer a Similar Helpdesk, But Gorgias Is Built For E-Commerce

Both tools deliver a similar customer experience, but their functionality and integrations were designed for different industries.

Gorgias is a tool that was built exclusively for e-commerce brands around Shopify.

The tool's integrations and usability are centered around the needs of e-commerce shoppers, such as order management, returns, and product recommendations.

Zendesk offers a broader application of their help desk, as the tools give you access to a wider range of integrations (including CRM and project management tools) and customizable workflows.

The software works best for large enterprises that want to set up advanced automations, integrate with other non-e-commerce tools, and build custom reports.

Zendesk is also better for brands that want to build more reliable automations and macros at scale.

The problem is that both of these tools require human agents to operate them.

Neither Zendesk nor Gorgias can offer a sales assistant-like experience to its customers to help them in their product discovery or comparison shopping phase.

Both tools also lack the analytical capabilities to help you learn more about your customers.

Zendesk and Gorgias will provide you with data on ticket resolution rates, and customer satisfaction, but they won't help you understand what kind of concerns your customers have or what they need to know before making a purchase decision.

Let's look at how Big Sur AI can enable a real-time shopping assistant experience for your customers while providing you with insights into consumer behavior:

Features - Gorgias vs. Zendesk vs. Big Sur AI

In this section, we'll review the key features of each tool and go over their use cases, and weaknesses.

TL;DR

▶️ Big Sur AI is best for improving the pre-purchase customer experience by setting up an AI-powered shopping assistant on your e-commerce store.

▶️ Gorgias is best if you want to set up a chatbot to help your e-commerce consumers resolve their post-purchase problems.

▶️ Zendesk is good for providing your customers with a multi-channel help desk to resolve their problems - in any industry.

Big Sur Assists Shoppers Before They Purchase

AI Sales Agent

Big Sur AI's Sales Agent re-creates the experience of talking to a knowledgeable and assistive salesperson who helps you with your buying journey.

With our software, you can create a sales assistant-like customer experience for when consumers need to choose a product or compare multiple alternatives.

• AI-Powered Assisted Shopping Experience: Your customers can have a natural language conversation with our AI bot, ask different questions, follow up, and get instant answers.
• Customized to your store and products: The software is fed and trained with your online store’s information.
• Optimized for conversions: The AI Sales Agent provides personalized product recommendations and suggests relevant follow-up questions all based on a data-driven basis around what would most likely lead to a conversion.
• Easy to set up on your online store: Takes less than 5 minutes to get started on Shopify.

💡 Based on our internal data, users who interact with Big Sur AI Sales Agent convert at 4x the rate of the average user at a store.

Conversion Optimized AI Prompts

Our AI tool prompts your consumers to ask the right questions to help them better understand your products.

These suggested questions are embedded on your product and collections pages, and are personalized for each customer.

The chatbot considers the user's shopping journey on the website and prompts questions that are optimized for conversions based on what topic will likely lead to a purchase.

Merchant Insights

Be data-driven about your customer interactions with our Merchant Insights.

Traditional help desks like Gorgias and Zendesk provide insights into the number of customer problems that have been resolved or the satisfaction rates with human agents.

Our software provides analytics and insights on the conversion rates of the different questions our AI Sales Agent asks, along with purchasing patterns like frequently bought together items.

For example, you could see that your users like to combine one of your products with an accessory on the website.

You can use this information on your website by interlinking the products, and our chatbot would be more likely to recommend that accessory in future conversations.

AI Product Recommendations

Our AI Sales Agent will help your customers find the best product for their needs.

When customers go to conventional stores, they have considerations and requirements, such as:

• Their age group.
• Their height or weight.
• Their allocated budget for that product.

With our AI Product Recommendations feature, our chatbot will consider this information and will provide your users with the right product on your website.

The chatbot can also recommend a set of products.

For example, your customers can ask the AI Sales Agent to help them customize a makeup routine to enhance their natural skin:

Big Sur AI is the right choice if you:

✅ Are an e-commerce store that wants to improve your pre-purchase customer experience.

✅ Want to better understand your consumers’ behavior and how they make purchase decisions on your website.

✅ Want to set up a 24/7 shopping assistant on your website that converses with your customers and helps them choose the right product for their needs.

Big Sur AI isn’t the best option if you:

❌ Are not an e-commerce store.

❌ Require a traditional help desk platform to equip your human agents with.

Gorgias Features

Gorgias Helpdesk

Gorgias lets you set up a unified customer service helpdesk and manage your customer interactions across multiple channels - email, chat, social, and more.

• Post-Purchase Support Management - enable your agents to refund, update, cancel, or approve return requests.
• Complete Customer Information - put all customer information in one place, such as previous conversations, orders, or subscription details.
• Set up AI-powered workflows - set rules to automatically route tickets, and personalize responses to customers with templates.
• Live chat functionality where your consumers can get their questions answered by generative AI before they are routed to a human agent.

💡You can combine Big Sur's pre-purchase AI Sales Agent with Gorgias' post-purchase workflows for a complete 360 customer experience.

Gorgias Automate

Leverage AI to resolve repetitive tickets with Gorgias Automate so your agents can spend more time on complicated queries.

Gorgias' AI agent learns your policies and brand voice to handle less complicated customer support queries.

The chatbot provides fast and accurate responses and integrates with your store's CMS, shipping software, and subscription software.

You can also review the AI interactions and give feedback to the tool to improve its accuracy of answers.

Gorgias Convert

Increase your online store conversion rates with AI prompts that appear when consumers browse through your product pages.

Gorgias Convert are campaigns that you can set up on your website that appear as pop-ups to provide personalized offers to your customers.

📝 This differs from how Big Sur AI aims to increase conversions - as our software focuses on in-chat product recommendations and on-page prompts.

Merchants can A/B test different offers and make iterative improvements by looking at the pop-ups' performance.

Gorgias is the right choice if you:

✅ Operate an e-commerce store and want to improve your customers' post-purchase shopping journey.

✅ Are tired of your human agents spending too much of their time on simple queries.

✅ Want to test out personalized offers on your website and evaluate their results.

Gorgias isn’t the best option if you:

❌ Are not an e-commerce store.

❌ Want to set up a pre-purchase chatbot to guide your customers through their product discovery phase.

Zendesk Features

AI-Powered Chatbot

Similar to Gorgias, Zendesk provides an AI-fuelled chatbot that aims to reduce customer support tickets by answering simple questions and customer concerns.

Zendesk has recently acquired Ultimate's AI chatbot whose chat feature can automate up to 80% of customer support requests.

The chatbot can detect customer intent (what they want) and provide instant replies.

The AI agents can also work across your social media channels, mobile app, and email.

Agent Copilot

Improve your agents' efficiency by providing them with all relevant details and suggested actions with Zendesk's Agent Copilot.

The Agent Copilot will bring context to your customers’ requests and will suggest the next actions to your agents.

You can set up macros that use AI suggestions to automate common responses to similar questions so your agents can resolve queries quickly.

📝 Big Sur AI provides a ''Copilot'' experience to your customers, while Zendesk provides a Copilot to your agents.

The tools are complementary to one another, and not direct competitors.

Zendesk Explore: Reporting & Analytics

Zendesk offers a dashboard so you can visualize:

• How many tickets have been created.
• Solved and unsolved tickets.
• Other metrics, such as one-touch tickets, and reopened ticket rates.

You can monitor the performance of your agents and keep track of unresolved tickets.

The dashboard can also be prompted with a question, where it will produce a Report.

For example, you can ask the tool how many tickets are outstanding for December, and the tool will create a custom report with that information.

Zendesk is the right choice if you:

✅ Are a large enterprise with a big team of agents that get customer requests from multiple channels.

✅ Want to make the lives of your agents easier by giving them an AI-powered Copilot.

✅ Want insights into how your agents are performing.

Zendesk isn’t the best option if you:

❌ Operate an e-commerce store.

❌ Want to improve your store's conversion rates.

Integrations - Gorgias vs. Zendesk vs. Big Sur AI

Third-party integrations are important to consider when evaluating your next customer support software.

This is because AI-powered tools need them to provide useful and accurate answers right away.

Big Sur AI Integrations

Big Sur AI offers the following integrations:

• E-Commerce CMS Integrations - with Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
• Klaviyo Integration - provide the tool with a list of topics that are of interest to your brand. When a conversation between our AI sales agent and a user matches that topic, the tool sends an event to Klaviyo for that customer ID.

Through our Merchant Hub, merchants can also integrate our own product suite that includes Analytics and Merchant Insights.

💡For Shopify stores, anyone can integrate BigSur without technical support. For non-Shopify stores, a developer is needed, but the integration is lightweight and seamless.

Gorgias Integrations

Gorgias provides all necessary deep integrations for e-commerce customer service:

• E-Commerce CMS Integrations - with Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce.
• Shipping & Returns Integrations - with AfterShip, ShipBob, and LateShipment.com.
• AI-powered integrations - such as Yuma AI, Sigma AI, and PerfectBot.AI.
• Data Management Integrations - such as Hubspot, Zapier, and Daasity Analytics.

From the e-commerce platforms, Gorgias only does not integrate with Squarespace.

Zendesk Integrations

Zendesk offers a wide range of third-party integrations (1,700+) in its marketplace.

• Team Productivity Integrations - such as Microsoft Teams, Jira, FreshBooks, and Slack.
• CRM & Marketing Integrations - such as Salesforce, Zoho CRM, and Mailchimp.
• AI-Powered Integrations - such as ChatGPT, TypeGenie, and Kaizo.
• E-Commerce CMS Integrations - pre-built and out-of-the-box integrations to Shopify, Magento, Narvar, Ada, and more.

Pricing - Gorgias vs. Zendesk vs. Big Sur AI

In the context of customer support tools, pricing matters because you need to know how much it costs to serve each customer query.

And for brands that get many tickets and customers on their site, choosing the wrong pricing structure can mean adding a ''0'' to your costs.

TL;DR

Gorgias bases its pricing on ticket volume and is charging $0.36 - $0.40 for each support ticket you receive over your plan's limit - the more tickets you receive, the more expensive it will get.

Zendesk has a simple pricing plan that costs per month per agent - the more agents you employ, the more expensive it will get.

Big Sur AI Pricing

Big Sur AI has 2 pricing models:

• Commission-Based Model - pay only when you get sales by the AI Sales Agent.

This is a pay-for-performance model, where you only pay a commission for the sale of your products where the customer interacts with the AI Sales Agent and then converts.

The conversion window is negotiated but it’s typically 30 days.

• Tiered Pricing Model - recurring monthly payment based on the average volume of unique visitors per month.

Think of these pricing models as if you’re hiring a salesman.

You choose between paying per unique visitors of your website, or a commission of each sale attributed to the chatbot.

Gorgias Pricing

Gorgias bases its pricing on the amount of tickets you receive.

For example, in their Basic Model, you'd have to pay $300/month to use the software if you receive 1,000 monthly tickets.

And if you're a larger brand that needs to deal with 4,000 or more tickets, you'd have to be on their Advanced Plan and pay $900/month.

If you reach the limit of tickets on your platform, you’ll need to pay additional costs. You'll be charged $0.36 - $0.40 for each support ticket you receive over your plan's limit.

Zendesk Pricing

The platform bases its pricing primarily on how many agents you have.

Zendesk has 4 pricing tiers:

• Suite Team: $55/agent/month, giving you access to all the essential features + AI agents.
• Suite Growth: $89/agent/month, giving you access to multiple ticket forms, light agents, and self-service customer portals.
• Suite Professional: $115/agent/month, giving you access to all advanced functionalities, such as custom analytics and skills-based routing.
• Suite Enterprise: Custom Pricing that covers Advanced AI add-ons, Sandbox, and AI-powered Content Cues.

What are Customers Saying about Gorgias, Zendesk, and Big Sur AI

When comparing software, we look at their reviews and testimonials to see what kind of experience their users have with the platforms.

Here's a quick summary of what customers are saying about these tools on popular platforms like G2, Capterra, and their websites:

🎯Conclusion for Big Sur AI: The AI Sales Agent helps increase conversion rates and improves customer experience by helping customers find the right products for them.

🎯Conclusion for Gorgias: While many merchants agree that the tool has improved their customer support and has good integrations, the tool can become quite expensive as tickets pile up.

🎯Conclusion for Zendesk: Users are delighted with the functionality and integrations of the tool, but note that it might be hard to set up.

Let’s see how customer support representatives, managers, and executives feel about Big Sur AI, Gorgias, and Zendesk.

Big Sur AI Reviews

‘’Adding Big Sur AI's Sales Agent provides immediate and accurate assistance, offering relevant information paired with the perfect product recommendation. This partnership has immediately enhanced our customer experience, which in turn has significantly increased our conversion rate.’’

‘’Our experience with Big Sur AI has been great. We're impressed with the pilot results showing a significant lift in sales. For our customers, purchasing an electric bike is a major decision. We have various models with different features and the real-time assistance facilitated by Big Sur AI's solution has been instrumental in converting browsers into buyers.’’

‘’Over the last few months, Big Sur AI has been an incredible partner driving real business impact for us. Their product was simple to integrate and their team is highly responsive to our inputs as a design partner.’’

What Gorgias Customers Are Saying

''Gorgias' ability to streamline customer support processes through automation and integration is one of the features I like most. The automation function, such as macros and triggers, helps reduce wait/response times and enhances team productivity. Integrations with various e-commerce platforms offer valuable insights to agents without needing to jump from one system to another.''

''Gorgias has helped us in managing our customers' concerns. What I like best about Gorgias is I can manage all our multiple emails and customer complaints/concerns in one platform.''

''We were looking for a helpdesk tool to make our customer service team more efficient by centralizing all communication channels into one (email, live chat, social media).''

What Zendesk Customers Are Saying

''As a user what I like the best about ZenDesk is its comprehensive feature that allows Customer support and has capabilities of integration with other systems like Google Suite (Google Sheets), frequency use, and automation systems for responding to some tickets. Additionally, due to its advanced features, it allows customization according to the company's specific needs and is easy to set up.''

''I like how Zendesk positions itself as the leader in support systems through engaging its community, purchasing key companies to aggregate value to their offerings and features (such as Ultimate for AI features, including an AI bot, and Klaus for QA).''

''Zendesk offers an easy-to-use and complete feature set for customer support and external documentation. All of which is maintainable by non-technical people.''

Wrapping Up: Gorgias vs. Zendesk vs. Big Sur AI

All three platforms have their unique strengths and use cases.

To summarize:

Gorgias ▶️ Ideal for post-purchase customer support in e-commerce stores that aim to resolve customer queries quicker.

Zendesk ▶️ One of the best all-around help desk that has the the biggest range of integration options and offers AI-powered tools to make your agents' lives easier by resolving customer queries faster.

Big Sur AI ▶️ Best for pre-purchase customer support in e-commerce stores that aim to increase conversions.

Gorgias and Zendesk are both solid options for post-purchase customer support, where Gorgias excels in e-commerce customer support.

Zendesk is better for all industries outside of e-commerce, as both Gorgias and Big Sur AI specialize in e-commerce.

Big Sur AI is a pre-purchase AI-powered chatbot that provides a shopping assistant-like customer experience and can be used as a complementary product to both Gorgias and Zendesk.

The tools approach merchant analytics and insights differently as well.

Zendesk and Gorgias focus on analyzing support tickets and give you insights into how many tickets are outstanding and average response rates.

Zendesk wins out on that versus Gorgias with its prompting features where you can get custom reports.

On the other hand, Big Sur AI offers insights into what kind of questions customers ask during their product discovery phase, what products and bought together, and the conversion rates of the chatbot's different questions.

To increase your store's conversion rates, you can equip your agents with Gorgias or Zendesk's post-purchase support software and your marketing team with Big Sur AI.