A complete overview of Gorgias assignment rules
Stevia Putri
Amogh Sarda
Last edited October 24, 2025
Expert Verified
Let's be honest, does your Gorgias inbox ever feel like a free-for-all? If you're seeing unassigned tickets stack up while your agents are stuck sorting through the queue instead of actually helping people, you're definitely not alone. This is exactly what Gorgias assignment rules are meant to fix. They're built right into the platform to help you bring some much-needed order to the chaos.
This guide will walk you through what these rules are, how they work, and, just as importantly, where they fall short as your team grows. We'll also look at how modern AI can step in where manual rules tap out, helping you build a smarter, more scalable workflow.
What are Gorgias assignment rules?
In a nutshell, Gorgias assignment rules are automated instructions you set up to send incoming tickets to the right person or team. It's kind of like a digital sorting hat for your support queue. You tell it what to look for, like the ticket's language, subject line, or where it came from, and it automatically sends it to the right group of agents.
The whole point is to cut down on manual work, spread the load evenly across your team, and get customers to the agent who can best help them, faster. According to the official Gorgias documentation, the system looks at ticket priority first, then when it was created, and finally checks which agent is available and has the lightest workload.
A look at the Gorgias dashboard, where agents manage customer tickets and assignment rules are applied.How to set up Gorgias assignment rules
We won't go into a full step-by-step tutorial here, but getting a feel for the moving parts of Gorgias assignment rules is key to making them work for you. It all comes down to a simple logic involving teams, conditions, and actions.
Creating teams for Gorgias assignment rules
Before you can assign a ticket, you need to have someone to assign it to. In Gorgias, you do this by creating Teams. These are just logical groupings of agents based on what they do. For instance, you could have:
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A "Returns & Exchanges" team
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A "Technical Support" team for the tricky product questions
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A "VIP" team for your most valuable customers
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A "Social Media" team to handle all the DMs and comments
Getting these teams set up properly is the foundation of any good assignment strategy.
Defining conditions for Gorgias assignment rules
Once your teams are ready, you need to tell Gorgias when a ticket should go to a specific team. This is all handled with a "WHEN... IF... THEN" logic. You pick a trigger (like "Ticket Created") and then add "IF" statements to get more specific.
Gorgias gives you a bunch of conditions to play with when building your rules.
| Condition Type | How You Might Use It |
|---|---|
| Ticket Channel | If a ticket comes from Chat, send it to the "Live Support" team. |
| Ticket Language | If the language is detected as French, route it to the "EU Support" team. |
| Ticket Subject contains | If the subject line has the word "damaged," assign it to "Resolutions." |
| Ticket Tags | If a ticket gets auto-tagged as "VIP," it goes straight to "Account Managers." |
| Customer Shopify Orders Count | If a customer has placed more than 5 orders, send them to the "Loyalty" team. |
Setting actions in Gorgias assignment rules
The last piece of the puzzle is the "THEN" part: what action should Gorgias take? The main one here is Assign Team. You can also have your rules Set Priority (Low, Normal, High, or Critical), which helps determine the assignment order. For example, a rule could automatically set a ticket with "urgent" in the subject to "Critical," bumping it to the front of the line.
An example of the if-then logic used to create Gorgias assignment rules for automatically assigning tickets.The limitations of manual Gorgias assignment rules
Look, for getting started, Gorgias assignment rules are great. They help you get organized. But as your business grows, you might start to notice some cracks. Relying only on a manual, rule-based system can eventually cause more headaches than it solves.
They don't understand nuance
The main issue with simple keyword rules is that they don't get context. For example, a rule that flags the word "refund" will treat a simple question like, "Hey, what's your refund policy?" the exact same way as an angry message shouting, "I WANT A REFUND NOW!" Both tickets land in the same pile, but they obviously need very different responses.
This is where a tool like eesel AI changes things up. Its AI Triage product doesn't just scan for keywords; it actually understands the ticket's meaning and sentiment. It can spot frustration or urgency and route the ticket to a specialist or escalate it right away, something a simple keyword rule just can't do.
They can be rigid and hard to maintain
When you're a small team, maybe 10 or 15 rules are manageable. But what happens when you add new products, support more languages, or open up new channels? That number can easily swell to 50 or more. Before you know it, you're spending your days untangling a messy web of rules where changing one thing accidentally breaks another. This "rule debt" can really bog down your support ops. Plus, Gorgias has a hard cap of 70 rules per account, which can be a real roadblock for bigger teams.
Instead of asking you to build and maintain an endless list of fragile rules, eesel AI takes a different approach. It learns from your past tickets to understand your business's unique support patterns. It adapts as new issues pop up, so you don't have to constantly be in there tweaking rules. You can connect it to your Gorgias account and see for yourself.
They can only see limited data
Gorgias rules mainly work with the information inside Gorgias, along with some basic Shopify data. But what if the most important details about a customer are stored somewhere else? You can't make a rule that prioritizes a ticket based on:
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A customer's subscription plan in Recharge.
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Their lead score in HubSpot.
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Technical info from your company's internal database.
eesel AI helps connect those dots. It can pull in knowledge from over 100 different places, including common tools like Confluence and Google Docs, or even custom sources. This means it can make smarter decisions about routing and resolving tickets because it has the full picture, not just what's in the helpdesk.
The Gorgias interface showing its native Shopify integration, which allows assignment rules to use basic Shopify data.Gorgias pricing for plans including Gorgias assignment rules
The rules feature is available on all Gorgias plans, but it's worth looking at the overall cost. The pricing is mostly tied to how many billable tickets you have each month.
| Plan | Monthly Price | Billable Tickets/mo | Key Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $60/mo | 50 | Basic helpdesk, social media integrations |
| Pro | $600/mo | 500 | Phone support, revenue statistics |
| Advanced | $3,600/mo | 3,000 | Dedicated success manager |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom ticket volume, advanced security |
While the rules engine comes included, its limitations can have hidden costs. The time your team spends wrestling with a complex web of rules or fixing tickets that were sent to the wrong place adds up. That's an operational cost that smarter automation can help reduce.
Taking your workflow beyond basic Gorgias assignment rules
Once you feel like you've squeezed all you can from Gorgias assignment rules, it might be time to bring some more intelligence into your setup. This doesn't mean you have to ditch your helpdesk and start from scratch. An AI layer like eesel AI plugs right into your Gorgias workflow, giving it some powerful new abilities.
The real shift is moving from a system that just follows rules to one that actively learns.
With a tool like eesel AI, you can:
Get started quickly
You can get it up and running in minutes, not months. There's no long sales process or complicated setup to worry about.
Test it out first
There's a simulation mode that lets you test the AI on your past Gorgias tickets. This way, you can see exactly how it would have handled things and get a real sense of the ROI before you turn it on for live customers.
Stay in control
You don't have to go all-in at once. You can start small by automating just one type of ticket (like all those "where is my order?" questions) and let the AI send everything else to your team. As you get more comfortable, you can let it handle more.
Automate smarter, not just harder
So, what's the verdict? Gorgias assignment rules are a fantastic starting point for organizing a messy inbox. They make sure tickets go to the right place and give you a basic structure for routing. But for growing brands, they're really just that, a starting point.
To really become efficient, you need intelligent automation that understands context, learns from your history, and gets better over time without you having to constantly babysit it. By adding an AI layer to your helpdesk, you can free your team from the headache of managing rigid rules and let them focus on what they're best at: delivering an amazing customer experience.
Ready to see what AI-powered automation can do for your team?
Learn how eesel AI enhances Gorgias with intelligent triage and automation.
Frequently asked questions
Gorgias assignment rules are automated instructions designed to route incoming support tickets to the appropriate agent or team. Their main goal is to reduce manual sorting, balance workloads, and ensure customers connect with the right help faster.
Setting up Gorgias assignment rules involves three main steps: first, creating logical teams of agents; second, defining conditions based on ticket attributes like channel or language; and third, specifying actions such as assigning the ticket to a particular team or setting its priority.
The key advantages include bringing order to a chaotic inbox, significantly reducing the time agents spend manually sorting tickets, ensuring an even distribution of workload, and improving the speed at which customers are connected to the most suitable support agent.
As a business grows, basic Gorgias assignment rules can become insufficient because they lack the ability to understand nuance, grow rigid and difficult to maintain, and contribute to "rule debt." Additionally, a hard cap of 70 rules per account can limit scalability.
Standard Gorgias assignment rules primarily utilize data present within Gorgias itself, along with basic Shopify order information. They generally cannot integrate with or pull in detailed customer data from external systems like subscription platforms or internal databases for routing purposes.
Yes, the functionality for Gorgias assignment rules is available across all Gorgias pricing plans. However, regardless of the plan, there is a universal limit of 70 assignment rules per account, which can become a constraint for larger or more complex support operations.
AI solutions can significantly enhance routing by understanding the meaning and sentiment of tickets beyond simple keywords, adapting automatically to new issues without constant manual rule adjustments, and integrating data from over 100 external sources to make smarter, more informed routing decisions.
