Gorgias Attentive: A complete guide for Ecommerce support

SMS is a fantastic way for online stores to get in touch with customers. It's direct, it's immediate, and it’s perfect for things like flash sale alerts and shipping updates. But what happens when customers reply to those texts with support questions? Things can get messy, fast.

Suddenly, your support team is bouncing between your helpdesk and your SMS platform, trying to piece together conversations. It's a classic case of lost context and wasted time.

The Gorgias Attentive integration is designed to solve this by pulling all those SMS conversations right into your Gorgias helpdesk. It's a solid first step, but is it the whole solution?

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about the Gorgias Attentive integration. We’ll cover what it does, how people use it, what Gorgias's pricing looks like, and where it falls short. Most importantly, we'll show you how to go beyond just forwarding messages and start automating your SMS support with AI.

What is the Gorgias Attentive integration?

To really get how they work together, it helps to know what each platform does by itself. They’re both big names in the ecommerce world, but they tackle very different problems.

Understanding Gorgias

Gorgias is a customer service helpdesk made specifically for ecommerce brands, especially ones built on Shopify. The main idea is to pull all your customer conversations (from email, social media, live chat, you name it) into one single dashboard. This helps your team stop being a cost center and start bringing in revenue by providing quick, helpful responses. Gorgias has some of its own AI features, but a lot of its efficiency comes from macros and simple, rule-based automations.

Understanding Attentive

Attentive is a powerhouse in SMS marketing. Its whole purpose is to help brands send personalized text message campaigns based on what customers do, driving sales with timely promos and updates. It's built for marketing and making money, not really for handling back-and-forth support chats.

How the integration works

The integration simply connects these two platforms. It forwards customer replies from your Attentive SMS campaigns directly into your Gorgias helpdesk. When a customer texts back, a new ticket automatically pops up in Gorgias.

Your agents can then reply from inside that Gorgias ticket just like any other message, and their response gets sent back to the customer as a text through Attentive. The setup has some handy features, like a "Support Confirmation Keyword," which lets you decide which messages actually create a ticket. This is great for stopping every "thx" or "cool" from clogging up your support queue.

Key features and use cases of the integration

Connecting Gorgias and Attentive gives you a few immediate wins that can make your support workflow a lot smoother and improve the customer experience.

Centralize SMS support conversations

The most obvious benefit here is just plain efficiency. Instead of your agents having to log into Attentive to see and reply to texts, everything lands in the same unified queue they're already working in all day. No more tab-switching. It also gives agents a full conversation history for every customer, across every channel. They can see an email from last week, a Facebook comment from yesterday, and a text from five minutes ago, all in one neat timeline.

Respond to customers in real-time

SMS is an instant channel, so people expect quick replies. Getting a text and then waiting hours for a response just feels wrong. This integration helps your team meet that expectation without having to babysit a separate inbox. According to one report, nearly a third of subscribers (31%) who get replies from brands to their texts actually spend more than those who don’t. By letting agents answer directly from Gorgias, you give them the power to have real-time conversations on the channel the customer already chose.

Drive revenue from pre-sales and support questions

Not every text is about a problem. A lot of them are pre-sales questions from shoppers who are close to buying something but just need a little nudge. Since the conversation is happening inside Gorgias (which is deeply connected to Shopify), your agents are in the perfect spot to close the sale. They can answer a quick question about a product, create a custom discount code, or even build a shopping cart for the customer right from the ticket. A simple question can easily turn into another sale.

Understanding Gorgias pricing

Before you jump in, it’s worth taking a minute to understand how Gorgias prices its service, because it's a little different. Gorgias pricing is mostly based on the number of "billable tickets" you handle each month, not how many agents you have.

So, what’s a billable ticket? It's any conversation that gets a response, whether it's from a human agent, an automated rule, or the Gorgias AI Agent. This is a pretty important detail. The base plans might look simple, but your costs can get unpredictable if you lean too heavily on their AI. The Gorgias AI Agent, for instance, is often an add-on that charges you per automated interaction (think something like "$0.90 per resolved conversation"). A busy month could leave you with a surprisingly large bill.

Attentive's pricing isn't public, so you'll have to chat with their sales team to get a quote based on what you need.

Here’s a quick look at Gorgias’s standard plans:

Limitations of the native integration

While getting all your messages in one place is a great start, the native integration has some real limitations that stop it from being a solution you can grow with.

The lack of intelligent automation

When you boil it down, the integration is just a message forwarder. It pushes a text into Gorgias, but it doesn't apply any intelligence to it. This means every single ticket that comes from an SMS, even the simple, repetitive ones like "Where is my order?", still needs a human agent to open it, read it, and type out a reply. As your SMS volume grows, this becomes a huge bottleneck and kind of defeats the whole purpose of automation.

The single source of knowledge limitation

The integration relies completely on your agents to have the right answers. They might use Gorgias Macros or just rely on memory, but the system itself can't pull information from other valuable places. It has no way to check your public help center, internal wikis on Confluence or Google Docs, or, most importantly, the resolutions from thousands of past tickets. This often leads to inconsistent answers and just adds more mental work for your team.

Manual triage and routing required

Gorgias does have its own Rules engine for routing tickets, but the integration itself doesn't do any smart triage for incoming SMS. An agent still has to manually read each message to figure out what the customer wants, apply the right tags, assign it to the right person or department, and set its priority. This manual step slows everything down and hurts your first response time.

No way to test performance beforehand

Once you flip the switch on the integration, you’re basically flying blind. There’s no way to predict how the new wave of SMS tickets will affect your support queue or guess how much of it you could potentially automate. This leaves you at risk of either overwhelming your team with a sudden spike in volume or giving your customers a slow, frustrating experience when they were expecting an instant reply.

Get more from your integration with eesel AI

Instead of just dumping every message on your already busy team, you can add an intelligent AI layer like eesel AI that sits right on top of your helpdesk. eesel AI can understand, automate, and resolve a huge chunk of these incoming SMS conversations before a human ever has to see them.

Automate responses to common SMS questions

The AI Agent from eesel AI connects to your Gorgias account in minutes and immediately starts learning from your past tickets, help center articles, and other knowledge sources. It can instantly resolve most of the repetitive questions that come through the Attentive integration, like order status updates, return policy questions, and product details. This frees up your human agents to focus on the complex, high-value conversations that actually need their expertise.

Unify knowledge for consistent answers

Where the native integration hits a wall, eesel AI punches right through. It connects to all your scattered knowledge sources, whether that's a public help center, internal wikis, Google Docs, or just the history of your past tickets. This creates a single source of truth for your entire support operation, making sure the answers sent over SMS are just as accurate and thorough as those on any other channel.

Test your performance with powerful simulations

One of the coolest features of eesel AI is its ability to run a completely risk-free simulation on your historical tickets. Before you ever turn the AI on for live customers, you can see exactly how many of your past SMS tickets it would have been able to automate and review the exact responses it would have sent. This takes all the guesswork out of the equation, gives you a clear idea of your potential ROI, and lets you launch with total confidence.

Moving beyond message forwarding

The Gorgias Attentive integration is a solid, practical first step for any ecommerce brand looking to get their SMS support under one roof. It solves the immediate, frustrating problem of having a fragmented workflow.

But true efficiency and a great customer experience that can scale don't come from just sending more tickets to your agents. They come from adding a layer of smart automation that can handle the routine stuff, so your team can focus on what really matters. A tool like eesel AI transforms the integration from a simple pipeline into a smart, automated workflow that makes agents more productive and keeps customers happy.

Take your support to the next level

Ready to see how much of your support volume you could actually be automating? Connect your helpdesk and run a free, no-risk simulation with eesel AI to get an instant report on your automation potential.

Run a free simulation or book a demo today.