Gorgias roles and permissions: The complete 2025 guide

Figuring out who gets access to what in your helpdesk is a lot like deciding who gets which keys to the office. You want your team to be able to move around and do their jobs, but you probably don't want the new intern wandering into the server room. Getting this balance right in Gorgias is key for keeping things secure, running smoothly, and managing your team effectively.

When you nail your permissions, agents have just what they need to be great at their jobs, without the risk of them accidentally changing a critical setting or seeing sensitive customer info. It just makes everything work better.

In this guide, we'll cover everything you need to know. We'll go through the five user roles in Gorgias, share some practical tips for assigning them, and then talk about how to take your team's output to the next level, beyond what manual settings alone can do.

What are Gorgias roles and permissions?

Simply put, Gorgias roles are just preset bundles of permissions that decide what a user can see and do. It's like a job title that comes with a specific set of keys. Can they answer a customer? Yep. Can they change the company credit card on file? Probably not, unless they have the right permissions.

This setup is what keeps your helpdesk secure and tidy. It lets you get really specific about who can do what, covering everything from replying to tickets to managing integrations or looking at company-wide reports.

Gorgias gives you five different roles to work with, designed to fit everyone from a curious colleague in marketing to the person who runs the whole show. Let's get into what each of them does.

A deep dive into the 5 Gorgias user roles

Each role in Gorgias is built for a specific level of responsibility. Getting the differences straight is the first step to building a team structure that's both efficient and secure.

Admin

• Who it's for: The account owner, a head of support, or anyone who needs full control over the helpdesk.

• What they can do: Pretty much everything. An Admin has the keys to the entire kingdom, with full access to billing, user management, integrations, rules, and all ticket data. They're the ultimate power-users.

• Use case: You'll want to be very selective with this one. Hand it out to only one or two trusted people who are in charge of the setup, security, and billing for your Gorgias account.

Lead

• Who it's for: Team leads, senior agents, or supervisors running the day-to-day operations.

• What they can do: Almost as much as an Admin, but with some important guardrails. They can't touch billing, add or remove other users, or mess with certain core integrations. But they do have full command over tickets, customer info, rules, macros, and tags.

• Use case: This role is ideal for anyone managing the support floor. They can set up workflows with rules and macros, jump on escalated tickets, and check on team performance, all without needing access to sensitive account settings.

Basic

• Who it's for: Your main crew of frontline support agents who see customer issues through from start to finish.

• What they can do: They have everything they need to manage tickets and customers, and importantly, they can use your integrations. This is a big one, as it lets them do things like look up an order in Shopify or issue a refund directly from the helpdesk. They just can't create or change things like rules or macros.

• Use case: This will likely be the standard role for most of your support team. It gives them the power to solve problems efficiently by letting them use your connected apps.

Lite

• Who it's for: New hires, interns, or anyone on the team who just needs to focus on talking to customers.

• What they can do: A Lite user can see and reply to tickets and leave internal notes for colleagues. That's about it. They can't use integrations (so no processing refunds), delete tickets, or touch any of the settings like rules and macros.

• Use case: This is the perfect training-wheels role. It lets new folks get comfortable with customer conversations without any risk of them accidentally breaking something or processing a mistaken refund. It's also handy for team members who simply don't need to access your e-commerce tools.

Observer

• Who it's for: People from other teams (think marketing, product, or sales) or managers who just want to keep an eye on things without jumping into conversations.

• What they can do: Exactly what the name says: observe. They can look at tickets, customer info, rules, and stats. They can also leave internal notes to pass along feedback, but they can't reply to a customer or change anything on a ticket.

• Use case: Great for keeping other departments in the loop. The product team can pop in to see what features people are asking for, or marketing can check the vibe on a new launch. It gives them the info they need without getting in the support team's way.

Gorgias roles comparison table

To make it even clearer, here’s a side-by-side comparison of what each role can and can’t do across the most important functions in Gorgias.

Function	Observer	Lite	Basic	Lead	Admin
User Settings
View	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Update	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Billing
View	N	N	N	N	Y
Update	N	N	N	N	Y
Customers
View	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Create/Update	N	Y	Y	Y	Y
Delete	N	N	N	Y	Y
Integrations
View	N	N	N	N	Y
Perform Action	N	N	Y	Y	Y
Create/Update	N	N	N	N	Y
Delete	N	N	N	N	Y
Macros
View	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Create/Update	N	N	N	Y	Y
Delete	N	N	N	Y	Y
Tickets & Messages
View	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Update	N	Y	Y	Y	Y
Internal Notes	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Reply	N	Y	Y	Y	Y
Delete	N	N	N	Y	Y
Rules
View	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Create/Update	N	N	N	Y	Y
Delete	N	N	N	Y	Y
Users
View	N	N	N	N	Y
Create/Update	N	N	N	N	Y
Delete	N	N	N	N	Y

Best practices for managing Gorgias roles and permissions

Okay, so you know the roles. But just setting them once isn't enough. The real trick is managing them smartly over time to keep your team secure and efficient. Here are a few simple habits to get into.

Start with the least access needed

It sounds a bit formal, but the "principle of least privilege" is a simple and powerful idea: give people the absolute minimum access they need to do their job, and nothing more. It's always safer to start someone with fewer permissions and add more later if they need it. For instance, have every new hire start with the "Lite" role. Once they've settled in and you're comfortable, you can bump them up to "Basic." This approach seriously cuts down on the chances of an accidental data leak or a "whoops, I didn't mean to change that" moment.

Do a regular permission check-up

Team roles change, people move on, and job duties get shuffled around. It's really easy for someone's permissions to get outdated, a little something called "permission creep." A good habit is to review all your user accounts every quarter or so. Just ask a few simple questions:

• Does everyone's current role still match what they actually do?

• Are there accounts for former employees that are still active? (This is a big one!)

• Has anyone collected a bunch of permissions over time that they don't use anymore?

And it should go without saying, but when someone leaves the company, remove their access right away.

Write down your rules for roles

It doesn't have to be fancy, but having a simple document that explains who gets what role can save a lot of headaches. Just a quick guide like, "New support agents get the 'Lite' role for 90 days, then move to 'Basic.' Team Leads always get the 'Lead' role." This keeps things consistent, helps new managers get up to speed quickly, and makes sure the whole process is clear and fair for the team.

Know where roles fall short

Here’s the catch with roles and permissions: they’re fantastic for deciding who does the work, but they don't do a thing to reduce the actual amount of work. Even with a perfectly organized team, your agents are still sinking time into repetitive stuff. They're manually tagging tickets, figuring out who to send them to, and typing out the same answers over and over. If you really want to scale your support, you have to look past just managing people and start automating some of that work.

How to scale support beyond roles and permissions

As your business grows, so does your ticket count, and suddenly you're spending more and more time managing permissions and workloads. The next smart move isn't just to keep tweaking who-does-what; it's to automate the boring, repetitive tasks that eat up your team's day.

Let an AI agent handle the easy stuff

What if you had a new team member who could do the job of a Lite or Basic agent, but they worked 24/7, answered instantly, and never needed a coffee break? That's what a good AI agent can do.

Tools like eesel AI connect directly with your Gorgias helpdesk and act as your first line of defense. It learns from your past tickets, help articles, and macros to pick up your brand's voice and figure out how you solve common problems. From there, it can start answering all those common questions automatically, clearing a big slice of your ticket volume before a human ever has to see it. The best part? You can get it running in minutes, not months. There are no long sales calls or complicated setup projects. You can connect your Gorgias account to eesel AI and have it working by the end of the afternoon.

Automate ticket sorting while you stay in control

Think about all the little things a Team Lead has to do: read every new ticket, add the right tag, decide how urgent it is, and send it to the right person. A lot of that is perfect for automation.

The AI Triage feature from eesel AI can take care of all of that for you. It reads new tickets, applies the right tags, sets the priority, and routes them to the correct agent or team, all on its own. This frees up your leads to spend less time on admin and more time coaching their team and dealing with tricky customer problems. But this doesn't mean you give up the driver's seat. You have complete control over what the AI touches. You could start by having it only handle one type of ticket (like "Where is my order?") and pass everything else to your team. This way, you can introduce automation at your own pace, without any surprises.

You can set automation boundaries to control which tickets the AI handles, ensuring you can manage Gorgias roles and permissions effectively while scaling support.

A quick note on Gorgias pricing and user roles

It's worth remembering that your Gorgias plan is tied to how many tickets you handle, which usually relates to how many people are on your team. You don't pay per user directly, but each pricing tier is built for a team of a certain size.

Here's a rough idea of their plans (based on prices from late 2024):

• Starter: $50/month for 50 tickets/month.

• Basic: $300/month for 400 tickets/month.

• Pro: $750/month for 3,000 tickets/month.

• Advanced: $1,875/month for 15,000 tickets/month.

If you go over your ticket limit, you just pay for the extra ones. But when your ticket volume is consistently growing, you'll eventually need to upgrade your plan, which usually means hiring more agents. This is where you hit a fork in the road: do you keep adding more people, or do you bring in automation to handle the extra load more efficiently?

A view of the Gorgias pricing plans, which are based on ticket volume rather than individual user seats, impacting how you manage Gorgias roles and permissions as you scale.

Build a secure and scalable support system

Getting a handle on Gorgias roles and permissions is the first step to building a support team that’s secure, efficient, and organized. When you use the five roles the right way and follow simple habits like doing regular check-ups, you create a smooth workflow where your team can thrive and your data stays safe.

But a well-organized team is just the starting line. To really grow your support without burning out your agents, you have to find a way to deal with the repetitive work that fills up the queue.

Once you've got your team set up with the right permissions, giving them an AI assistant to handle the grunt work is the most sensible next move.

Curious to see how it works? Learn how eesel AI can help your Gorgias team automate away the routine questions.