Gorgias auto assign: The 2025 guide to smart ticket routing

Remember when your support inbox was manageable? Then you grew. Suddenly, what was once a neat queue is now a free-for-all where agents grab the easy tickets and the tricky ones sink to the bottom. Manually assigning every ticket starts to feel like a full-time job in itself, and you can see the results: slower responses, burnt-out agents, and unhappy customers.

Automation seems like the obvious fix. It promises to bring some order back to the chaos, making sure every ticket lands in the right hands without someone having to play traffic cop all day. This guide is all about the native Gorgias auto assign feature: what it is, how you set it up, and, just as importantly, where its limits are. We’ll also look at how you can layer on a smarter AI to really get your workflow humming.

What is Gorgias auto assign?

At its core, Gorgias auto assign is a built-in feature that automatically hands out incoming tickets to your agents or teams. Think of it as a digital mail sorter for your helpdesk. It operates on a few simple components that you put in place yourself.

First, you organize your agents into Teams. These are just groups of people based on what they’re good at, like a "Returns" team or a "Technical Support" team. Pretty straightforward.

Next, you build a list of Rules. These are simple "IF/THEN" commands you create. For example, you might set up a rule that says, "IF a ticket has the word 'refund' in it, THEN assign it to the Returns team."

Finally, the system uses Agent Eligibility to finish the job. Once a ticket is sent to the right team, Gorgias looks for an available agent in that group who has the fewest open tickets. You can even cap the number of tickets an agent can have at one time to prevent anyone from getting buried. It’s a solid system for getting tickets out of the main inbox and into a more specific queue.

How to set up Gorgias auto assign: The native approach

Getting the built-in Gorgias auto assign feature up and running in Gorgias is a three-step dance. It’s definitely doable, but you’ll quickly see how much manual work is needed to keep things running just right.

Step 1: Group your agents into teams

The first thing you’ll need to do is pop into your Gorgias settings and sort your agents into teams. This is all about specialization. You might create a "Shipping & Delivery" team, a "Product Questions" team, and maybe a "Wholesale" team. This step basically creates the different buckets you'll be sorting tickets into.

Step 2: Build your routing rules

Here's where you'll spend most of your time. You have to create custom rules that tell Gorgias exactly where each ticket should go. This means you have to think ahead and predict the keywords, channels, or tags that will be attached to different types of tickets.

For instance, you might build a rule that sends all messages from your Instagram DMs to the "Social Media" team. Or another that looks for the SKU of a specific product and sends it to the team that specializes in it. As you can probably guess, this list of rules can get very long, very fast.

A screenshot showing the rule creation interface in Gorgias, illustrating how IF/THEN commands are used for auto-assignment.

Step 3: Configure assignment and capacity settings

Once your teams are created and your rules are built, the last step is to turn it all on. You'll enable the auto-assignment setting and tell Gorgias the maximum number of chats or emails an agent can handle at once. This is a handy feature to stop your most efficient agents from being overloaded while others have nothing to do.

But here’s the thing: building and maintaining these rules isn't a one-and-done task. Every time you launch a new product, run a sale, or a new type of customer issue starts popping up, you have to go back in and tweak your rules. It can easily feel like you're always playing catch-up.

The limitations of rule-based Gorgias auto assign

While the rule-based system in Gorgias is a huge leap from assigning everything by hand, it has some real limitations that start to show as your business scales.

Gorgias auto assign: It's all logic, no nuance

Rules are black and white. They can't figure out the actual intent or feeling behind a customer's words. A rule that scans for the keyword "cancel" can't tell the difference between "How do I cancel my order?" and "I can't believe you won't let me cancel my subscription." A sarcastic customer complaining about their "fantastic" broken product will sail right past its filters, which means tickets get misrouted and customers get even more frustrated.

Gorgias auto assign upkeep is a time sink

Your business is always evolving, and your rules have to keep up. A new product line, a holiday promotion, or an unexpected shipping delay all demand that you dive back into the settings to add or edit rules. Over time, you build this massive, tangled web of logic that’s easy to break and a headache to manage. This complexity often leads to tickets accidentally ending up in the wrong queue, or worse, no queue at all.

Gorgias auto assign can’t learn on its own

A rule-based system only knows what you tell it. It has no ability to look at your thousands of past support conversations and learn how your best agents solve certain problems. It can't spot new trends in customer complaints or identify common friction points without you manually digging for them and then building a rule to handle them. It's reactive, not proactive.

Gorgias auto assign makes decisions with limited information

Native Gorgias rules can't peek into your other systems, like checking an order's value in Shopify, before deciding where to send a ticket. This is a big deal. It means you can't automatically flag a ticket from a high-value customer with an urgent problem and bump it to the front of the line. This gap is pretty clear, especially since the "ability to dictate priority of tickets" is still on the Gorgias product roadmap for future development.

A view of the Gorgias interface showing a customer's Shopify data integrated directly beside their support ticket.

A smarter way to handle Gorgias auto assign with an AI layer

Instead of throwing out your helpdesk and starting over, you can add an intelligent AI layer that plugs right into your existing Gorgias setup. This gives you all the power of modern AI without the massive headache of migrating to a new platform.

Go from building rules to instant learning

With a tool like eesel AI, you can connect your Gorgias account in a single click. That’s it. The AI immediately starts reading your historical tickets, macros, and help center articles. It figures out your brand voice, understands your most common customer issues, and learns the solutions your team has already been using. This is a completely different world from spending days or weeks trying to build and perfect a rigid set of rules.

Get truly intelligent ticket assignment

An AI layer does so much more than match keywords. It analyzes the intent, sentiment, and urgency of every single message to route tickets with an almost human-like level of understanding. More importantly, eesel AI can perform custom actions on the fly. It can look up order details in Shopify, check a customer's subscription status, or pull data from another system before it decides what to do with the ticket. This means that high-priority issues from VIP customers get automatically flagged and escalated, with zero manual work from your team.

Test and deploy your AI without the risk

One of the biggest fears with implementing AI is the "what if." How will it actually behave with my real customers? eesel AI has a clever solution for this: a simulation mode. You can test your entire AI setup on thousands of your past Gorgias tickets in a totally safe environment. You get a report that shows exactly how the AI would have tagged, routed, or even fully resolved each ticket. This gives you a clear, data-driven forecast of its performance and what your automation rate will look like. You can deploy it with confidence, knowing precisely how it will perform before it ever touches a live conversation.

A demonstration of the simulation feature in an AI tool, showing how it would have handled past tickets, which is crucial for testing a Gorgias auto assign AI setup.

Automate more than just Gorgias auto assign

An intelligent AI layer doesn't just stop at routing tickets. It can help streamline your entire support operation. It can provide full, autonomous resolutions for the most common questions like "Where is my order?". For the trickier issues, it can act as an AI Copilot for your agents, drafting accurate, on-brand replies that they can send in seconds. It also automatically tags and categorizes every ticket, keeping your helpdesk analytics clean and giving you better insights into what your customers need.

Pricing comparison: Gorgias auto assign vs. an integrated AI solution

Of course, we have to talk about the cost. While Gorgias has its own AI features, its pricing model is very different from a dedicated AI platform that integrates with it.

The Gorgias pricing structure

Gorgias's pricing is mostly tied to how many billable tickets you handle each month. Their AI Agent features are sold as an add-on, and you pay for each interaction. This means on top of your monthly plan, you're charged every time an automation resolves a ticket. That might seem fine at first, but the costs can become unpredictable and grow right alongside your ticket volume, which feels a bit like being penalized for efficiency.

Plan	Monthly Price	Included Tickets	Overage Cost (per 100)	AI Agent Cost (per interaction)
Basic	$50/mo	300	$40	$0.90
Pro	$300/mo	2,000	$36	$0.90
Advanced	$750/mo	5,000	$36	$0.90
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom	$0.90

This pricing is based on info from the Gorgias pricing page and could change.

How eesel AI pricing works: Transparent and predictable

eesel AI does things differently. The pricing is a flat monthly fee that includes a generous bucket of AI interactions. An interaction is counted as either a reply or an action (like tagging a ticket or looking up an order).

The biggest difference here is predictability. There are no per-resolution fees, so you won't get a surprise bill at the end of a busy month. Your costs are fixed, which lets you automate as much as you want without worrying about an invoice that spirals out of control. Plus, eesel AI offers flexible month-to-month plans you can cancel anytime, which is a nice change from the annual commitments that are common elsewhere.

Plan	Monthly Price (Billed Annually)	Monthly AI Interactions	Key Features
Team	$239	Up to 1,000	Train on docs, AI Copilot
Business	$639	Up to 3,000	Train on past tickets, AI Actions, Simulation

From rigid Gorgias auto assign rules to intelligent routing

The native Gorgias auto assign feature is a great starting point for automation, but its dependence on manual rules puts a cap on how efficient your team can truly be. As your business grows, you'll find yourself spending more time managing a complex web of rules and less time focused on what actually matters: helping your customers.

Modern support teams need something more dynamic, a solution that learns from your data and adapts with your business. By layering an AI platform like eesel AI on top of your helpdesk, you really get the best of both worlds. You keep the helpdesk your team is already comfortable with, while adding a powerful new layer of intelligent automation for routing, assigning, and even fully resolving tickets.

Ready to see how AI can change your Gorgias workflow? Start your free trial with eesel AI or book a demo to see the simulation mode for yourself.