A practical guide to automating Gorgias workflows in 2025

If you're using Gorgias, you're probably familiar with the scene. Tickets are piling up, customers want answers yesterday, and your team is scrambling to keep everyone happy. It feels like a constant juggling act. The only way to get ahead, and not just keep your head above water, is to get your workflows sorted out. Nailing down how you manage support is the key to growing without letting quality slip.

This guide is designed to help you do just that. We’ll walk through the tools Gorgias gives you out of the box, like Flows, Macros, and Rules, and see what they're good for. More importantly, we’ll talk about where they fall short and how you can push past those limits with a smarter, AI-driven approach to your Gorgias workflows.

What are the built-in Gorgias workflows?

Gorgias comes with a handful of tools meant to help you automate the repetitive stuff and bring some order to the chaos. You can think of them as the basic building blocks for a more efficient support system. Before we get into the more advanced strategies, let's do a quick rundown of what each one does.

An overview of Flows

Flows are those interactive, step-by-step guides you can build for your customers. You’ll usually find them in a chat widget, help center, or on a contact form. The idea is to let customers solve their own problems by guiding them through a series of questions and answers. They’re handy for things like product recommendation quizzes, sizing guides, or walking someone through your return policy without getting an agent involved.

Understanding Macros

Macros are essentially pre-written responses. They’re templates that your agents can pull up to answer common questions in a single click. So, instead of typing out the same answer to "What are your shipping times?" over and over, an agent can just use a Macro. They can even pull in customer info, like a name or order number, to make the message feel a bit more personal.

How Rules work

Rules are the automations that work in the background. They’re simple "if this, then that" commands that trigger actions based on a ticket's content. For example, if a ticket comes in and the message includes the word "refund," you can set up a Rule to automatically tag it as "Urgent" and send it to the right team. It’s all about sorting and organizing tickets before an agent even lays eyes on them.

Here’s a simple way to look at how they differ:

Feature	Primary Use	User Interaction	Complexity
Flows	Customer self-service guides	Interactive (Customer-facing)	Medium (Visual builder)
Macros	Canned responses for agents	Manual (Agent-initiated)	Low (Simple templates)
Rules	Backend ticket management	Automated (System-triggered)	Medium (If/then logic)

Common uses for native Gorgias workflows (and where they fall flat)

These native tools are genuinely helpful for making a dent in a high ticket volume. But as you'll soon see, they have some pretty clear boundaries that keep you from getting to a truly hands-off automation setup. Let’s look at a few common scenarios.

Automating order status questions

A huge part of any support agent's day is spent answering "Where is my order?" (WISMO) questions. You can use Gorgias to set up a basic workflow where a Rule spots tickets with phrases like "order status." It then triggers a Macro to automatically reply with a templated answer that includes the customer's tracking link.

The limitation: The problem is, this system is a stickler for the rules. It relies entirely on exact keywords. If a customer asks, "Has my package shipped yet?" or "Any update on my delivery?", the automation will likely miss it completely. It's just a simple text-matcher, so it doesn't understand what the customer actually means. And it definitely can't handle follow-up questions or tell if a customer is getting annoyed.

Guiding customers with self-service workflows

Flows are great for predictable questions. You can build a Flow that asks a customer if they want to make a return, then asks for their order number, and finally points them to your returns portal. It’s a solid way to deflect simple tickets and let customers find their own answers.

The limitation: A Flow is a fixed path, kind of like an old-school phone menu, press one for returns, press two for exchanges. It can't really adapt if a customer's situation is slightly different from the script. What if their return is for an international order that has a different policy? The Flow just stops, and the customer ends up waiting for an agent anyway. On top of that, Flows can't learn from information that lives outside of Gorgias, like a detailed policy document you have stashed in Google Docs or a clever solution from a past support ticket.

Standardizing agent responses with Macros

Macros are fantastic for keeping everyone on the same page. They make sure every agent is using the right brand voice and giving out the same info for frequently asked questions. They're quick, easy, and help bring down response times.

The limitation: Macros are static. They don't learn from new situations or get smarter over time. An agent still has to manually dig through a potentially long list to find the right Macro. And if a customer has a question with a few different parts, a single Macro probably isn't going to solve it. They can't piece together a genuinely helpful, detailed response based on the whole conversation or the customer's history.

What standard Gorgias workflows look like

So, what does this all look like in practice? A typical ticket’s journey using only Gorgias's built-in tools is a mix of automated steps and manual work.

Imagine a ticket lands in the queue. A Rule might scan it for a keyword like "return" and automatically tag it. When an agent opens the ticket, they see the tag and manually select the "Return Policy" Macro. From there, it's up to them to handle any follow-up questions. For anything that doesn't fit neatly into one of these boxes, it's a completely manual job from the very beginning.

While these tools are a good first step, they’re fundamentally reactive. They operate on rigid logic, which creates a ceiling for how much you can actually automate, leaving your team to pick up the slack.

How to truly automate Gorgias workflows with an AI layer

To get past that ceiling, you need to add a layer of intelligence on top of Gorgias. Real automation isn't about replacing your helpdesk; it's about making it smarter. An AI layer can figure out what a customer is trying to say, learn from all your scattered company knowledge, and take action, shifting your support from reactive to proactive.

Move beyond rigid rules with conversational AI

The issue with rule-based systems is that they don't really understand people. And people don't speak in keywords. A conversational AI, on the other hand, does.

An AI platform like eesel AI integrates directly with your Gorgias account and understands the meaning behind a customer's words, not just the words themselves. It can tell the difference between a simple question and a frustrated complaint. It can pick up on nuance and sentiment, letting it respond with genuine empathy and provide a useful answer, which is something a static Macro just can't do.

Unify all your knowledge

Gorgias's built-in automation tools can only use the information you feed directly into them. But where does your team actually find answers? They’re probably digging through old tickets, internal wikis, and random Google Docs.

That's where eesel AI comes in. It connects to all your knowledge, no matter where it is. It learns from your past support tickets to get a feel for your brand voice and common solutions. It can pull information from your Confluence pages, Google Docs, Notion, and more. This gives your AI agent the full picture so it can answer complex questions that need info from multiple places, all without an agent having to do a thing.

Test your workflows with confidence using simulation

One of the scariest parts of automation is the thought of letting a bot loose on your customers. What if it gets things wrong? How can you be sure it will actually help and not just make people more frustrated?

This is where eesel AI is different. It has a simulation mode that lets you test your AI setup on thousands of your own past tickets. You can see exactly how the AI would have responded to real customer questions, giving you a clear, risk-free forecast of your automation rate and performance before you ever switch it on for live customers. Most other platforms ask you to just cross your fingers and hope for the best; eesel AI gives you confidence backed by your own data.

Get started in minutes, not months

You shouldn't need a six-month project to get started with AI. The real value comes from getting up and running quickly.

eesel AI is designed to be self-serve. You can connect your Gorgias account with a single click and set up your first AI agent on your own, in just a few minutes. You don't have to sit through mandatory demos or long sales calls to get going. You can be running simulations and seeing potential results the same day you sign up.

Understanding Gorgias pricing for AI and automated Gorgias workflows

Cost is always a big piece of the puzzle, and Gorgias's pricing can be a little tricky. They price their main helpdesk and their AI features separately, so you need to understand both to get the full picture.

Gorgias helpdesk plans

The core of Gorgias's pricing is based on the number of "billable tickets" you handle each month. A billable ticket is any conversation that gets a response from a person, a Rule, or the AI Agent.

Here's a quick look at their main helpdesk plans:

Plan	Monthly Price (Starts at)	Included Tickets	Overage Cost
Starter	$10/mo	50	$0.40 / ticket
Basic	$50/mo	300	$40 / 100 tickets
Pro	$300/mo	2,000	$36 / 100 tickets
Advanced	$750/mo	5,000	$36 / 100 tickets
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom

The Gorgias AI agent add-on

On top of your helpdesk plan, the Gorgias AI agent is an extra cost. This is where it gets interesting. Gorgias charges you per automated interaction. On their annual plans, this works out to be around $0.90 for every single conversation the AI resolves on its own.

This pricing model can lead to unpredictable and growing costs. The better you get at automating tickets, the more you pay. You're pretty much penalized for being more efficient.

This is a big difference compared to eesel AI's pricing, which is based on simple, predictable monthly or annual plans that include a generous number of AI interactions. With eesel AI, you're not charged per resolution. This means you can automate as many tickets as you can without worrying about a surprise bill. Your costs stay predictable, which lets you scale your automation without any financial guesswork.

Move from basic rules to smart automation for Gorgias workflows

The native Gorgias workflows are a great place to start. They can bring a much-needed dose of organization and efficiency to a busy support team. But they are just that, a starting point. Their rule-based design means you’ll always hit a limit, leaving a huge number of your tickets for your agents to handle by hand.

To really scale your support and give customers the instant, helpful answers they've come to expect, you need to add an intelligent AI layer. You need a system that can understand context, learn from all your business knowledge, and be rolled out safely and with confidence.

eesel AI offers a simple and powerful way to upgrade your Gorgias setup. It works with your existing helpdesk to automate away the repetitive work, freeing up your team to focus on the conversations that actually require a human touch.

Ready to see what your true automation rate could be? Start your eesel AI free trial or book a demo to simulate our AI on your past Gorgias tickets.