A complete guide to Gorgias intent detection in 2025

If you run support for an e-commerce brand, you know the drill. The flood of repetitive tickets is a daily reality. Questions like "Where is my order?", "How do I make a return?", and "Is this back in stock?" can easily swamp your team, pulling them away from customers with more complex issues. It’s a common growing pain: how do you keep up with more tickets without just throwing more people at the problem?

Tools like Gorgias have become a go-to answer, and its Gorgias intent detection feature is a big part of that promise. It’s built to figure out why a customer is writing in, so you can start to automate the simple, repetitive stuff.

While it's a decent feature for getting your feet wet with automation, it’s important to understand what it does well and where it falls short. This guide will walk you through exactly how Gorgias intent detection works, what it's good for, and what you’ll need to think about when you’re ready for something with a bit more horsepower.

What is Gorgias intent detection?

Simply put, Gorgias intent detection is a feature that automatically reads incoming customer messages to figure out the main reason for the contact, or the "intent." Think of it as a digital sorting hat for your support inbox.

Its main job is to categorize tickets so you can apply automation rules. For example, it can tell the difference between a customer asking for a refund, one checking on their shipping status, or someone just sending a quick thank you.

It works using a machine learning model trained on e-commerce conversations. The model scans a message and tries to match it to a predefined list of intents that Gorgias has created. Once an intent is spotted, it acts as a trigger in Gorgias's Rules engine. From there, you can set up automations to tag the ticket, assign it to a specific person, or even fire back an automated reply.

A screenshot of the Gorgias dashboard, where intent detection helps to sort and manage customer tickets automatically.

Key features of Gorgias intent detection

Gorgias’s system is designed around the most common e-commerce questions, which makes it pretty easy to set up for basic automation right out of the box.

Predefined intents and sentiments

One of the nice things for new users is that Gorgias comes with a fixed list of intents. You don't have to sit around brainstorming every possible customer question, because the system is already trained to recognize the greatest hits of e-commerce support.

This includes common queries like "order/status", "return/request", and "shipping/delivery-issue". The system also tries to detect customer sentiment, identifying if a message is "positive", "negative", or "urgent". You can mix and match these to create more specific rules, like automatically escalating a ticket that has both a "return/request" intent and an "urgent" sentiment.

Here are some of the most common intents you'll see in Gorgias:

Intent Category/Subcategory	Description
Order/Status	Questions about where an order is or for tracking info.
Return/Request	Requests from customers wanting to start a return.
Exchange/Request	Requests from customers who want to exchange an item.
Shipping/Delay	Messages about a package that's taking too long to arrive.
Product/Availability	Questions about whether a product is in stock.

Automation through rules and macros

The real magic happens when you connect intent detection to Gorgias’s "Rules" engine. The whole thing works on simple "IF/THEN" logic: if Gorgias detects a certain intent, then it can automatically do something for you.

This opens the door to a few common use cases:

• Auto-tagging: You can automatically slap tags like "WISMO" or "Return Request" onto tickets. This keeps your inbox tidy and makes it way easier to see why customers are contacting you in the first place.

• Auto-replies: For "order/status" intents, you can use a macro to instantly reply with the customer's tracking information, potentially solving the ticket without an agent ever touching it.

• Auto-closing: When a customer replies with a simple "thank you," the "other/thanks" intent can trigger a rule to close the ticket. This clears it from the queue so your team can focus on tickets that actually need a response.

The flow is straightforward: a new message comes in, the AI detects the intent, and a rule is triggered to tag it or send it to the right team. For simple questions, another rule might send an automated response. Everything else lands in the general queue for an agent to pick up.

Gorgias's Rules engine uses IF/THEN logic to automate actions like tagging and assigning tickets based on detected intents.

Where the predefined system falls short

While Gorgias gives you a good starting point for automation, its rigid, predefined structure starts to feel a bit restrictive as your support team scales or deals with more unique customer problems.

What happens when an intent isn't on the list?

Let's be real: customers don't talk like robots, and their problems are often messy. They don't always use the exact keywords or phrasing a system is trained on. If a customer's issue doesn't fit neatly into one of Gorgias's preset categories, one of two things usually happens: the intent isn't detected at all, or it gets misclassified as "Other/Other".

When that happens, your automation breaks down, and the ticket gets punted back to the manual queue. This puts a cap on how much you can actually automate. You're stuck with the handful of scenarios the system was built for, leaving a long tail of more specific or unusual questions for your agents to handle one by one.

Limited customization and control

With a predefined system, you can't create your own custom intents. Let's say you sell a product that requires a bit of assembly, and you get tons of questions about "installation help." You can't teach Gorgias to recognize that specific intent and route those tickets to your technical expert. You're stuck with the categories they give you.

In contrast, a truly flexible AI system learns from your actual support history. For example, platforms like eesel AI analyze your past tickets to understand all your customer intents, not just a fixed list. This lets you build automations for issues that are unique to your business, giving you much more control.

A key limitation: Knowledge is stuck inside Gorgias

Gorgias's intent detection works best with the data it can see directly: your helpdesk tickets and your connected Shopify store. But what happens when the answer to a customer's question lives somewhere else?

If your detailed product guide is in a Google Doc, your warranty policy is in a Confluence page, or your shipping exceptions are in an internal PDF, the automation hits an end. An agent has to stop what they're doing, leave Gorgias, hunt for the information in another system, and then come back to reply. All that manual work defeats the purpose of automation.

This is a common headache with helpdesk-native AI. To get around this, modern platforms bring all your knowledge sources together. With eesel AI, you can connect not just Gorgias, but also Confluence, Google Docs, and over 100 other sources, giving your AI a complete brain to work from.

Unlike the limitations of Gorgias intent detection, modern AI platforms can connect to multiple knowledge sources like Google Docs and Confluence for more comprehensive answers.

Going beyond basic intent detection

Real AI-powered support isn't just about sorting tickets into buckets. It's about understanding context, taking smart actions, and constantly learning from every conversation.

From fixed rules to a custom workflow engine

Gorgias runs on simple "If/Then" logic. It’s fine for basic tasks but doesn't handle complex situations very well. A more powerful approach is a fully customizable workflow engine where you're in complete control. You should be able to define the AI's personality, its tone of voice, and the exact conditions for how it operates.

With eesel AI's prompt editor, you call the shots. You can define exactly how the AI should respond, what actions it can take (like calling an external tool to check real-time inventory), and when it should immediately hand off a ticket to a human. This moves you from basic tagging into true, intelligent automation.

Test with confidence before you go live

Pushing a new automation rule live can be nerve-wracking. One bad rule could accidentally send the wrong response to hundreds of customers, creating an even bigger mess.

The answer is simulation. A key feature of any serious AI platform is the ability to test its performance on your past tickets before it ever talks to a real customer. Gorgias doesn't really have a simulation feature, which means you’re basically testing in a live environment.

With eesel AI, you can run your AI agent in a simulation mode over thousands of your historical tickets. You get a clear forecast of its automation rate and can review every single response it would have sent, letting you fine-tune its behavior with zero risk.

Advanced alternatives to Gorgias offer simulation modes to test AI performance on historical tickets before going live.

Gorgias pricing vs. a more predictable model

Gorgias uses a ticket-based pricing model. Each plan includes a certain number of "billable tickets" per month, and you pay extra if you go over that limit. This can lead to some unpleasant surprises on your bill, especially for e-commerce brands that see huge ticket spikes during Black Friday or other big sales.

In contrast, eesel AI offers transparent pricing based on AI interactions, not tickets. With a flat monthly or annual fee, you never have to worry about a busy month causing your costs to shoot up. This lets you budget effectively and scale your support without being punished for your own success. A sudden rush of customer questions won't lead to a volatile bill; your costs stay flat and predictable.

It's time to move beyond basic Gorgias intent detection

Look, Gorgias intent detection is a useful tool. For e-commerce brands just getting started with automation, it offers an easy way to handle common questions and buy back some time for your agents.

But its limitations become pretty obvious as you grow. The fixed list of intents, the siloed knowledge, and the lack of deep customization mean you'll eventually hit a ceiling.

For teams that want to build a truly scalable and smart support operation, you'll need a more powerful solution. A platform like eesel AI gives you the control, flexibility, and unified knowledge needed to automate a much wider range of questions accurately and confidently, letting you grow without limits.

Ready to see what a fully customizable AI agent can do for your team? Start your free eesel AI trial today.