How Gorgias improved customer service response times by 27% with Knock

Gorgias, the leading conversational AI platform for ecommerce, powers support and marketing for more than 15,000 online stores including Steve Madden, Arc'teryx, Olipop, PrincessPolly, and RareBeauty. The platform provides AI-powered marketing and support solutions, through email, chat, and social channels. Gorgias is the only AI tool that drives sales and automates support through 1-to-1 conversations, helping e-commerce merchants deliver exceptional customer service at scale.

"Every day online stores get questions from shoppers through many different channels," explains Yegor Yakovishen, the Senior Engineering Manager at Gorgias. "Gorgias helps to centralize this communication in one place so that customer support agents can handle requests manually or by using conversational AI."

As Gorgias grew to serve thousands of e-commerce merchants, their in-house notification system for support agents couldn't keep pace with their growth. With only email and browser notifications supported, and no way to track deliverability, the team knew they needed a more robust solution. Rather than invest engineering resources into building notification infrastructure from scratch, Gorgias chose to partner with Knock to focus on their core mission of building the best e-commerce customer experience platform.

The situation: outgrowing transactional emails

For conversational AI platforms like Gorgias, notifications are mission-critical. When a customer writes in with a support request, agents (both human and AI) need to be sent an immediate notification to meet response time SLAs. And when an agent snoozes a ticket to follow up later, they need reliable reminders. When new messages arrive in an ongoing conversation, both customers and agents need asynchronous updates.

"Before Knock, we had basic notifications implemented in the platform," explains Yakovishen. "But that implementation was not ideal from a technical standpoint. It was only email and browser push notifications, and for very specific use cases. Those notifications were also not reliable. No one actually knew how many notifications were delivered or were missed."

The limitations became more apparent as Gorgias grew. For many critical events like new messages in tickets or ticket assignments, the system only sent email notifications, which agents often did not immediately see. With over 15,000 online stores now relying on Gorgias to power customer support, the team needed a solution that could:

• Reliably deliver notifications at scale.
• Support multiple notification channels beyond just email.
• Track delivery and engagement metrics.
• Enable rapid implementation of new notification types.

"At Gorgias, we believe in focusing our engineering resources on our core competency—building the best e-commerce customer experience platform possible," explains Alex Plugaru, CTO at Gorgias. "For infrastructure that requires specialized expertise, we look to partner with best-in-class providers. This lets us move faster and deliver more value to our customers."

The solution: cross-channel notifications with Knock

After evaluating several options, including continuing with their in-house solution, Gorgias chose Knock for their notification infrastructure. The decision aligned with their broader engineering strategy of partnering with specialized providers for non-core functionality.

"Building notifications is a special engineering challenge,” explains Yakovishen. “Maybe for a very basic use case, like sending a transactional email, it's easy. But for in-app and mobile push notification there are several primitives that you must build to make it reliable, to make it consistent."

Their decision to use Knock came down to three key factors:

1. Product and technical excellence. Knock's specialization in notifications gave Gorgias the confidence that the product had solved the complex challenges of reliable delivery that they needed for their growing customer base.

2. Superior documentation and developer experience. Knock’s clear and well-organized documentation would enable Gorgias's team to get started quickly and find answers to implementation questions without bottlenecks.

3. Support for in-app and push channels. Gorgias saw that Knock's pre-built React components and mobile SDKs could help their team swiftly implement in-app and push notifications.

From proof of concept to production

What would have typically been a multi-month engineering project was completed 33% faster with Knock.

Building a centralized notification hub

The team began by implementing a notification center directly within the Gorgias interface. This center is accessible through a dedicated tab in the sidebar and provides agents with a comprehensive view of their support activities.

Gorgias used Knock's React components with custom styling to match their own design system. This approach created a notification experience that feels native to their product while leveraging Knock's powerful infrastructure.

Orchestrating the customer support workflow

Gorgias implemented sophisticated notification workflows to support their entire ticket lifecycle.

When a new support ticket comes in, the assigned agent receives an immediate in-app notification through the notification center, along with a mobile push notification. This dual-channel approach ensures urgent customer needs never go unnoticed.

The team also built intelligent notification flows around ticket snoozing, a critical feature for managing follow-ups. When an agent snoozes a ticket—perhaps waiting for a customer response or additional information—Knock manages the entire reminder workflow. As the snooze period ends, the system automatically notifies the agent through their preferred channels, ensuring no follow-up falls through the cracks.

Adding visibility with analytics

Before Knock, Gorgias had no way to measure notification delivery or engagement. "No one actually knew how many notifications were delivered or were missed," explains Yakovishen.

Now the team tracks when users interact with notifications, including opening the notification center and marking notifications as read. This data enables Gorgias to measure the impact of notifications on support team performance and optimize their notification strategy over time.

Results: Gorgias set a new standard for ecommerce customer service

Since implementing Knock in early 2024, Gorgias has transformed their notification infrastructure from a source of uncertainty to a reliable, scalable system powering customer support operations across thousands of e-commerce stores.

Gorgias's platform leverages conversational AI to handle a significant portion of customer inquiries without human intervention. This AI-first approach ensures the most common support issues are resolved quickly and efficiently before reaching Gorgias's support agents.

Next, Gorgias uses a multi-channel notification system to help customer agents stay productive and responsive when handling the more complex support requests that the AI cannot fully resolve. These Knock-powered notifications prevent agents from becoming overwhelmed, allowing them to provide personalized assistance to shoppers.

By combining intelligent AI-driven automation with Knock’s notification infrastructure, Gorgias has established itself as the leading customer experience platform for e-commerce, empowering merchants to deliver exceptional support.

Agents using the new notification center show approximately a 27% improvement in first response time and 32% faster ticket resolution rates compared to the previous system.

"We see that after we ship notifications, the users who actively use the notification center have lower resolution times and first response times," says Yakovishen. This improvement in response speed helps Gorgias's customers deliver better service to their end users, directly impacting customer satisfaction and retention.

Gorgias grew from delivering transactional email for a few use cases, to delivering 15 million notifications monthly across their platform – a volume that continues to grow as they add more stores and expand notification types. On Cyber Monday alone Knock helped deliver 961k notifications to agents, a single day record for Gorgias.This growth has been achieved while maintaining consistent delivery and performance, ensuring that every ticket update and customer message reaches the right agent at the right time.