A strategic guide to using Gorgias rules to send CSAT survey only for first time buyers

You know this already, but not all customer feedback is the same. The thoughts you get from a first-time buyer are pure gold for figuring out your initial customer experience. But that feedback is worlds apart from what a ten-time repeat customer can tell you about what keeps them coming back.

The real trick is figuring out how to talk to these two groups separately without getting lost in a mess of spreadsheets and manual follow-ups.

Trying to send targeted surveys by hand is a complete non-starter once you have more than a few dozen customers. But if you just blast the same generic survey to everyone, you end up with noisy data that’s impossible to use. How are you supposed to find clear, actionable insights in that?

Help desks like Gorgias give you some tools to slice and dice your audience with rules, but that approach has its own share of headaches. This guide will walk you through how to set up CSAT surveys for new buyers in Gorgias, explain the common problems with relying on manual rules, and show you a much more powerful, AI-driven way to handle customer feedback.

What are Gorgias CSAT surveys?

A Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey is just a straightforward way to see how happy a customer is with a specific interaction. It usually comes down to one simple question, something like, “How would you rate the support you received?” It’s a quick and easy way to get a pulse check on your customer service quality.

In Gorgias, this feature is built right into the platform. You can set it up to automatically pop a survey over to a customer after their support ticket is closed. This gives you instant feedback on that particular conversation, which is a pretty standard feature in modern help desks. The magic isn't in having the feature, it's in how you use it.

It's also useful to know how Gorgias prices its plans, because it can affect how you think about automation. Their plans are based on the number of "billable tickets" your team handles each month. A ticket becomes billable if it gets a response from a human agent, a rule, or an AI. This means every automated CSAT survey you send could count toward your monthly limit. On top of that, their separate AI features are priced based on automated resolutions, which can make your costs jump around unexpectedly as you grow.

Gorgias Plan	Monthly Price (Billed Yearly)	Billable Tickets Included	AI Agent Interactions Included
Starter	N/A (Monthly Only)	50	0
Basic	$50/mo	300	60
Pro	$300/mo	2,000	600
Advanced	$750/mo	5,000	2,500
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom

Data sourced from the official Gorgias pricing page.

Why you should survey first-time and repeat customers differently

Separating your feedback isn't just a neat trick; it's a core part of a smart business strategy. First-time buyers and loyal customers are on completely different paths, and their feedback highlights different parts of your business.

The first-time buyer perspective

Feedback from a new customer is your best chance to see your business through fresh eyes. You get unfiltered opinions on things like:

• The first impression: Was your website easy to get around? Did they find what they were looking for without a headache?

• The checkout process: Did anything feel clunky or weird when they tried to pay?

• Meeting expectations: Did the actual product live up to what your marketing promised?

Nailing this is a big deal. A report from Salesforce found that 89% of people are more likely to buy again after a good first experience. Any negative feedback you get from this group is basically a blinking red light, showing you exactly where people are dropping off before you even get a chance to win them over.

The loyal customer perspective

Your repeat customers have a totally different story. Their feedback is where you learn about the long game:

• What creates loyalty: What's the secret sauce that keeps them choosing you over competitors?

• Product performance over time: How does your product hold up after months or years of use?

• Your brand's direction: What do they think about new features, products, or changes you're making?

These are the people who can tell you how to create true fans of your brand. Asking them the same basic questions you ask a brand-new buyer is a huge missed opportunity to get some deeper insights.

How to use Gorgias rules to send CSAT survey only for first time buyers

Alright, so you want to send a CSAT survey only to your first-time buyers. In Gorgias, you can pull this off with their "Rules" feature. Instead of a long, boring tutorial, let's just break down the logic behind it.

The main idea is to build an automation that only fires when a support ticket is closed for a customer who has exactly one order tied to their name. This whole setup depends on your e-commerce integration (like Shopify) or BigCommerce) correctly syncing customer order data into Gorgias.

Here’s the simple logic your rule would use:

• The Trigger: The whole thing kicks off when a "ticket is closed."

• The Condition: Before doing anything, the rule checks if the customer's data fits a specific profile. In this case, the condition is "Customer order count is 1."

• The Action: If, and only if, that condition is true, the rule then performs its action: "send satisfaction survey." If the customer has zero orders or ten orders, the rule just sits there and does nothing. No survey sent.

This "if-this-then-that" logic is pretty simple and works well for basic segmentation. You could use the same idea to target other groups, like sending a special thank-you message to VIPs with over 10 orders or asking for specific feedback from someone who bought a particular product.

A screenshot showing the interface for setting up Gorgias rules, which can be used to send CSAT surveys to first-time buyers.

The limitations of using Gorgias rules for first-time buyer surveys

While the logic seems simple enough on the surface, relying on manual, rule-based systems for something as important as customer feedback has some real drawbacks. This is where the simple "if this, then that" approach starts to show its cracks.

Things get complicated, fast

That one little rule for first-time buyers is never just one rule for long. What if you only want to survey customers who didn't return their first item? Or what if you want to wait three days before the survey goes out? Each new condition needs another rule, and before you know it, you're trying to manage a fragile web of automations that could break if you look at it the wrong way. It’s the total opposite of the simple, self-serve setup of a tool like eesel AI, which you can get running in just a few minutes.

Rules don't understand context

Gorgias rules are black and white. They can check if an order count is "1," but they can't understand the feeling of the conversation. Was the customer frustrated but ultimately happy with how you solved their problem? Did they seem confused about how to use the product? A rule-based survey misses all of this rich context. In contrast, an AI tool like eesel AI can train on your past tickets from the moment you connect it, learning the nuances of your customer conversations to make much smarter decisions.

They're hard to scale

As your business grows, so do the weird exceptions and one-off scenarios. Trying to maintain dozens, or even hundreds, of specific rules becomes a full-time job. It's just not a system that can keep up with a growing team that needs to move quickly.

They're stuck in a bubble

Gorgias rules can only see the data inside your help desk. They can't pull information from a Google Doc with your international shipping policies or a Confluence page with troubleshooting guides. This is a huge handicap compared to eesel AI, which can connect to over 100 knowledge sources instantly, giving it way more context for every single interaction.

There's no good way to test them

Once you build a rule in Gorgias, you just have to switch it on and cross your fingers. There's no way to see how it would have performed on thousands of your past tickets. You're essentially flying blind, and one wrong setting could lead to spamming your customers or, just as bad, not collecting any feedback at all.

A smarter alternative to Gorgias rules: Using AI

Instead of getting tangled up in a bunch of rigid rules, a more modern approach is to use a dedicated AI platform for customer support automation that plugs right into the help desk you already use, whether that's Gorgias, Zendesk, or something else. This is how you move from static instructions to dynamic intelligence.

Modern AI doesn't just follow a script; it reads and understands the content of each ticket to make a smart call. Instead of just checking if an "order count = 1," an AI can see a first-time buyer asking about product setup and proactively ask them for feedback on your onboarding guides a few days later. It gets the context, not just the data points.

This is where a tool like eesel AI really makes a difference:

• Go live in minutes, not weeks. Forget about spending days building and testing a bunch of complicated rules. You can connect your Gorgias help desk with a single click. eesel AI starts learning from your existing data right away, so you can have smart automation working for you in minutes.

• You're in complete control. You don't have to flip a switch and automate everything at once. eesel AI gives you selective automation, which means you decide exactly which types of tickets the AI handles. You can start small, maybe by having it only collect feedback for first-time buyers, and let it pass everything else to your human team with full confidence.

• Test without the stress. This is huge. eesel AI has a powerful simulation mode that lets you safely test your setup on thousands of your actual past tickets. You can see exactly how the AI would have replied, get solid forecasts on automation rates, and tweak its behavior before it ever talks to a real customer. No more guessing games.

• Pricing that makes sense. Remember how some platforms can hit you with surprise bills after a busy month? eesel AI offers transparent and predictable pricing based on the capacity you need. There are no sneaky per-resolution fees, so you're not punished for offering fast, efficient support.

Moving from rigid rules to intelligent insights

Targeted feedback from your first-time buyers is one of the best tools you have for making your customer journey better. It shows you exactly where the bumps in the road are and what you need to fix to build loyalty right from the start.

While help desk rules in tools like Gorgias give you a basic way to start segmenting your feedback, they’re ultimately too stiff, hard to manage as you grow, and just don't have the contextual awareness you need to do it well. They were a decent solution for yesterday's problems.

AI isn't about replacing your amazing support team. It's about giving them a tool that can handle complex logic and automation intelligently. This frees up your agents to focus on the high-value, human conversations that build real, lasting customer relationships.

If you're tired of wrestling with brittle rule engines and want to get deeper, more useful insights from your customers, it might be time to look at a more powerful and flexible solution. See how eesel AI can plug into your existing help desk and give you the power of intelligent automation without the management headache.