A practical guide to Gorgias round robin for support teams

Let's be honest, manually assigning support tickets is a headache. It's slow, prone to bias, and often leads to "cherry-picking," where agents grab the easy tickets and the tricky ones are left to gather dust. This is why automated systems like round robin were created in the first place, to bring a little fairness and balance to the workload.

In this post, we’re going to dig into how Gorgias round robin works for both calls and tickets. We'll walk through the good parts, explore the limitations that scaling teams eventually bump up against, and look at a more intelligent way to get the right ticket to the right person, every time.

What is Gorgias round robin?

Round robin is a simple, automated way to hand out conversations to your team one by one, in a loop. Think of it like dealing cards around a table, the idea is to give everyone an equal number of tickets to work on.

In Gorgias, this feature is most clearly defined for phone calls using their Voice add-on. The system looks for the agent who has been waiting the longest for a new conversation and sends the next one their way. This is different from a "broadcast" approach, which blasts an alert to all available agents at once and lets whoever is fastest grab the ticket.

While the term "round robin" is officially for their call queues, you can rig up a similar system for emails and chats using a mix of teams and rules. It’s all about creating a predictable, orderly line so no single agent gets buried in work.

How to route calls and tickets with Gorgias round robin

Getting a round robin system up and running in Gorgias is a great first move to calm the chaos in your support queue. It establishes a baseline of fairness that can really help build a more collaborative team spirit.

Setting up Gorgias round robin for call queues

For phone support, Gorgias gives you direct control over how calls are distributed through its call queue settings.

Here’s a quick look at the settings you’ll be using:

• Assigning Teams: First, you’ll assign one or more of your support teams to a specific call queue. This just tells Gorgias who is eligible to get calls from that phone number.

• Ringing Behavior: This is where the magic happens. Admins can choose "Round-robin" to ring agents one by one or "Broadcast" to ring everyone simultaneously.

• Ring Time: You can also decide how long a call should ring for one agent before the system gives up and moves on to the next person in line.

This setup makes sure incoming calls are offered to the agent who’s been idle the longest, which helps spread the phone support workload evenly.

Using rules and teams for Gorgias round robin

For other channels like email or chat, getting that round-robin effect takes a little more creativity with Gorgias's Rules engine.

Here’s what that process generally looks like:

1. First, you create a Rule that kicks in when a new ticket meets specific conditions, like the channel it came from or certain words in the subject line.

2. The action for that Rule will be to "Assign team."

3. Once the ticket is assigned to that team, Gorgias's built-in auto-assignment feature takes over. It then hands out the ticket to an available agent on that team using its round-robin logic.

A screenshot showing how to set up rules in Gorgias to auto-assign tickets based on if-then commands for a round robin system.

The pros of a basic Gorgias round robin system

To be clear, this approach has some solid advantages, especially for teams trying to escape the free-for-all of a shared inbox.

• Fairness: It pretty much guarantees that every agent gets a similar number of tickets over time. This is a big win for team morale and helps stop anyone from feeling totally overloaded or, on the flip side, underutilized.

• Prevents Cherry-Picking: By assigning tickets automatically, you sidestep the classic problem of agents dodging difficult conversations and leaving them to sit in the queue.

• Simplicity: It’s a straightforward system that’s easy to understand. Everyone knows how it works, which helps create a smooth and organized workflow.

The limitations of a simple Gorgias round robin system

While round robin is a decent starting point, its simplicity can turn into a real problem as your team gets bigger and customer issues get more complex. Here’s where the system starts to feel a bit strained.

Lack of skill-based or intelligent routing

The biggest downside of a basic round robin system is that it sees all tickets and all agents as being the same. It has no idea about an agent's specific skills, language abilities, or deep product knowledge.

This creates some pretty obvious slowdowns. A highly technical question about your API might get assigned to a new hire who is still figuring out the basics. At the same time, a simple "Where is my order?" ticket could land with your top technical agent, which is a total waste of their expertise. This not only makes resolutions take longer but also causes a lot of internal friction as tickets have to be passed around manually.

Inefficiency and manual overrides

The strict, one-after-another nature of round robin often forces agents to find workarounds. An agent might be marked as "available" in Gorgias, but in reality, they could be neck-deep in a complex investigation for another customer.

When a new ticket lands in their lap, they have a tough choice: either drop what they’re doing and switch contexts (losing focus on the harder problem), or interrupt their flow to ask a manager to reassign the ticket. Either way, it kind of defeats the purpose of having an automated system.

Doesn't account for true agent workload or capacity

Gorgias round robin assigns tickets based on who has been idle the longest, not who actually has the bandwidth to take on more work.

Think about it this way: one agent is juggling five simple tickets that each take two minutes to solve. Another agent is working on a single, super-complex issue that will take them two hours to figure out. The round robin system sees the second agent as more "available" because they haven't closed a ticket in a while. It then assigns them the next incoming ticket, which just leads to an uneven workload and potential burnout.

Beyond Gorgias round robin: A smarter approach with AI triage

Instead of just blindly handing out tickets, modern AI can first understand them. By analyzing a ticket's content, an AI can figure out what the customer wants (like a refund or help with a technical bug), get a sense of their mood, and pull out important details.

This level of understanding opens the door to much smarter and more effective routing. You could build a workflow that automatically sends all Spanish-language tickets to your Spanish-speaking agents or shoots every ticket from a VIP customer straight to your most senior team members.

This is where a tool like eesel AI steps in. It connects directly to your Gorgias helpdesk, adding a layer of intelligence right on top of your existing setup. You don't have to rip out and replace the tools your team already knows how to use.

How eesel AI enhances ticket routing

eesel AI moves past simple distribution to offer truly intelligent automation.

• Contextual Understanding: eesel AI connects to Gorgias and immediately starts learning from your past tickets. It figures out your common customer issues, your brand's voice, and what a good resolution looks like for you. This allows its AI Triage product to categorize and route new tickets with impressive accuracy right from the start.

• Custom Actions & Granular Control: You can build workflows that do much more than just assign a ticket. For example, an eesel AI Agent can automatically tag a ticket as "Urgent," add an internal note with key information for the agent, and then send it to the right Tier 2 team, all before a human even lays eyes on it.

• Full Automation Potential: For common questions like "What's your return policy?", eesel AI can give an instant, accurate answer and close the ticket automatically. This frees up your team from answering the same questions over and over, letting them focus on conversations that actually need a human touch.

Table: Gorgias round robin vs. eesel AI triage

Understanding Gorgias pricing

To get the full picture, it helps to know how Gorgias structures its pricing. The platform's cost is mainly based on the number of "billable tickets" you handle each month, with separate costs for add-ons like AI.

• Helpdesk Plans: These plans are tied to your monthly ticket volume.

  • Starter: $10/mo for 50 tickets.

  • Basic: $50/mo for 300 tickets.

  • Pro: $300/mo for 2,000 tickets.

  • Advanced: $750/mo for 5,000 tickets.

  • Enterprise: Custom volume and pricing.

• AI Agent Add-on: It’s important to know that Gorgias's own AI features are an add-on that costs extra. The price is based on each automated interaction, like $1.00 for every fully resolved conversation on the monthly Starter plan. This pay-per-resolution model can lead to some unpredictable bills, especially during your busy seasons.

From Gorgias round robin to intelligent automation

Gorgias round robin is a good starting point for any support team trying to bring some order and fairness to their queue. It’s a useful tool for stopping cherry-picking and making sure every agent is pulling their weight.

But as your team grows, the limits of a system that can't understand ticket complexity, agent skills, or actual capacity become pretty hard to ignore. The next logical step for your support operations is to move from simple distribution to intelligent automation, where tickets aren't just passed out but are actually understood, categorized, and sent to the right place for the fastest, best possible resolution.

For teams that are starting to feel the growing pains of a basic routing system, it might be time to see what AI can really do. eesel AI offers a powerful, self-serve platform that works seamlessly with Gorgias. You can use its simulation mode to see exactly how many of your tickets could be automated or routed more intelligently, all without any risk.