How to use Gorgias AI to detect negative sentiment and notify a manager

There’s a specific kind of dread that keeps support leaders up at night: missing a really negative customer experience until it’s way too late. An unhappy customer's ticket gets lost in the shuffle, and by the time a manager sees it, the damage is done. You’ve lost a customer, and maybe you’ve even earned a bad review that scares other people away.

Let's be real, trying to manually scan every single ticket for frustrated customers just isn't going to work once you have any kind of real volume. You need an automated system that can reliably flag these situations and get them in front of the right person, fast.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to use the built-in AI tools in Gorgias to set up a basic alert system. But more importantly, we’ll talk about the roadblocks you’ll likely hit with that native approach and show you how to build a much more powerful and reliable workflow. By adding a specialized AI layer, you can make sure no unhappy customer ever slips through the cracks again.

What is Gorgias's native sentiment detection?

Gorgias is a super popular helpdesk for ecommerce brands, and for good reason. It’s known for its tight integrations with platforms like Shopify, which lets support teams see order details and take action without having to switch tabs. A big piece of the Gorgias puzzle is its AI, which is designed to automate common tasks and give agents more context on their tickets.

How intent and sentiment detection works

One of the main AI features in Gorgias is its intent and sentiment detection. This tool automatically reads incoming messages to figure out two things: what the customer wants (their intent, like processing a return) and how they feel about it (their sentiment, which could be positive, negative, or neutral).

Based on this analysis, Gorgias slaps a tag on the ticket, like "negative-sentiment". This tag is the starting point for any automation you want to build. The idea is to give your agents a quick heads-up about a customer's mood before they even open a ticket, which is a decent place to start.

A look at the Gorgias interface where rules are created to automatically tag tickets based on sentiment.

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Setting up a basic sentiment detection workflow

So, can you actually set up a workflow in Gorgias AI to detect negative sentiment and notify a manager? Yep, you can build a basic one using its "Rules" engine. It’s a pretty straightforward process that can get a simple alert system up and running. Here’s how you’d go about it.

The whole thing works on a simple "IF-THEN" logic: if Gorgias thinks a customer is unhappy, then it pings a manager.

1. Trigger: The process kicks off when a new ticket arrives and the Gorgias AI automatically adds the "negative-sentiment" tag to it. That's your signal.

2. Rule Creation: You’ll need to go into your Gorgias settings and create a new Rule. You'll set the trigger to "Ticket created" and then add the condition: "If tags contain negative-sentiment".

3. Action: Once the rule is triggered, you have to tell it what to do next. The most common ways to notify a manager are:

   • Adding an internal note that @mentions a specific manager or team lead (for example, "@Jane Doe can you take a look?").

   • Applying another tag, like "manager-review" or "escalation", so you can filter these tickets into their own view.

   • Assigning the ticket directly to a manager or a special "manager review" team.

While this setup works on a surface level, it doesn’t take long before you start hitting some frustrating limitations.

The limitations of the native approach

This built-in workflow is a good first step, but it has some real weaknesses that stop it from being a truly dependable solution.

• The logic is too rigid. Gorgias Rules are great for simple triggers, but they get tripped up by anything more complex. What if you only want to notify a manager about negative feedback from VIP customers? Or if the negative comment is about a specific bug you’re already tracking? Trying to chain rules together to create that kind of logic gets messy, becomes a headache to manage, and often just breaks.

• The notification options are basic. Your choices for notifications are stuck inside Gorgias. You can add a note or assign a ticket, but what if your managers aren't glued to Gorgias all day? What if they live in Slack? Or what if you want to automatically create a task in a project management tool to track the problem? Getting that information out of Gorgias requires some clunky workarounds, if it’s even possible at all.

• You can't test it with any confidence. This is probably the biggest issue. You have to build the rule and just… hope it works. There’s no way to run a simulation on your past tickets to see how many escalations it would have caught correctly or, more importantly, what it might have missed. You're basically flying blind and testing your new process on live, already unhappy customers. Not ideal.

Building a more powerful workflow

To get past the limits of Gorgias's built-in tools, you don't need to tear everything out and start over. The fix is about giving your helpdesk a brain boost. You can layer a specialized AI platform on top of it, giving you the power of more advanced AI and flexible workflows while your team stays in the helpdesk they already know.

eesel AI offers a one-click integration with Gorgias that you can set up in a few minutes, giving you a much smarter and more reliable way to handle these sensitive tickets.

Step 1: Unify your knowledge for higher accuracy

Generic AI models are pretty good at spotting obvious anger, but they often miss the subtle stuff that’s specific to your business. Is a customer using the word "disappointed" a major red flag or just minor feedback? The accuracy of eesel AI comes from its ability to learn from all your company's knowledge.

It connects to your thousands of past Gorgias tickets, your help center articles, your internal notes in Google Docs, and even product info from Shopify. This helps it build an understanding of what "negative sentiment" actually means for your customers and your business, which leads to way more accurate detection.

Step 2: Use a flexible workflow engine

This is where you can really start to build a system that works the way you work. The customizable workflow engine in eesel AI lets you create complex, multi-step logic that Gorgias Rules just can't touch.

Instead of a simple "if negative, then notify," you can build a workflow that actually reflects your business priorities.

Here’s a practical example:

With eesel AI, you could create a workflow that says: "IF a ticket has negative sentiment AND the customer's Shopify lifetime value is over $1,000 AND the message mentions 'checkout error', THEN send a high-priority message to the #dev-alerts Slack channel, @-mention the Head of Support, AND apply a 'Critical-Bug-Report' tag in Gorgias."

This is all possible because you can set up "Custom Actions," which let the AI push notifications and data to pretty much any other tool you use, whether that's Slack, Jira, or a custom dashboard. You're no longer stuck with only the options available inside your helpdesk.

Step 3: Test your workflow with simulation

This might be the most powerful part of the whole thing: you can test your entire setup before it ever interacts with a live customer. eesel AI has a feature called Simulation Mode.

You can run your advanced workflow on thousands of your past Gorgias tickets in a safe, separate environment. The simulation will show you exactly how the AI would have responded, which tickets it would have escalated, and what actions it would have taken. This gives you a clear forecast of its impact and proves the value before you even turn it on, so you can be completely confident your logic is solid.

Gorgias vs. eesel AI: A comparison for sentiment detection workflows

For a quick, scannable summary, here’s how the two approaches stack up for this specific job.

Feature	Gorgias (Native)	eesel AI (Integrated)
Sentiment Accuracy	Good for general sentiment based on a universal model.	Higher accuracy, trained on your specific past tickets and docs.
Workflow Logic	Basic rules with simple "IF-THEN" triggers.	Advanced, multi-conditional logic ("IF-AND-OR-THEN").
Notification Actions	Limited to internal Gorgias actions (tags, notes).	Fully customizable actions to external systems (Slack, Jira, etc.).
Setup & Integration	Built-in, configured via the Rules dashboard.	Truly self-serve setup with a one-click Gorgias integration.
Testing & Validation	No simulation mode; must test on live tickets.	Powerful simulation on historical data before going live.

Pricing and predictability

How you pay for these tools also matters, especially when you’re dealing with ticket volumes that can go up and down.

• Gorgias: Uses a ticket-based pricing model. Their plans come with a set number of "billable tickets" each month, and you pay extra if you go over. This means your costs can be unpredictable and scale directly with your support volume. A busy month means a bigger bill.

• eesel AI: In contrast, eesel AI offers transparent, interaction-based pricing. The plans are based on the number of AI interactions you need, not how many tickets you get. This gives you predictable costs that don't punish you for having a busy month, so you won't be surprised by a high bill after a random spike in customer issues.

Go beyond basic alerts

Gorgias gives you a fundamental way to flag negative customer sentiment, and it’s a perfectly fine place to start. It will definitely help you catch some of the most obviously upset customers. However, its native tools are limited in how smart they are, how flexible they can be, and how they can notify your team in the apps they actually use all day.

For a truly solid system that catches every critical issue, allows for complex business rules, and gives you the confidence to automate, you need something more. Layering an intelligent platform like eesel AI on top of your existing helpdesk is the modern way to solve this. You don't have to replace your tools; you just have to make them smarter.

Ready to build a sentiment detection workflow you can actually trust? Try eesel AI for free and simulate it on your Gorgias tickets in just a few minutes.