Gorgias Contacts & Customer Profiles Explained

Contacts vs. the CRM debate — a quick distinction

"Is Gorgias a CRM?" is a genuine debate, and we cover it separately in is Gorgias a CRM. This post is about the actual feature: the Contacts area and the customer profile that Gorgias builds under the hood. Gorgias isn't a sales CRM with pipelines and deal stages — it's a support help desk — but it does keep a real customer record per contact, and that record is where the order-linked history and merged identities live. If you're new to the product overall, what is Gorgias sets the wider scene; here we zoom into the profile itself.

Where contacts live and what a profile shows

You reach the Customers area from the top-left of the helpdesk. Per Gorgias' Manage Customers documentation, you click Customers in the top left (or use Search and switch to the Customers tab) to see the full list of every contact in your account. Click into any one and you get the customer profile.

A profile holds all their contact information and records of their contacts. Concretely, that means:

1. Name, email address, and phone number — the core identity fields, with an option to add a phone number if one isn't captured yet.
2. Internal notes — free-text context your agents leave, editable directly on the profile (great for "prefers email over phone" or "known chargeback risk").
3. Customer Fields — Gorgias describes these as unique properties that let your agents capture additional information beyond the standard fields. Think loyalty tier, subscription plan, or a warehouse region — anything your team wants to see at a glance and filter or automate on later.

Those same details also surface in the right-hand sidebar of any ticket, so an agent rarely needs to leave the conversation to know who they're talking to.

The customer timeline: order-linked history in one view

The profile's most useful surface is the Customer Timeline — a consolidated feed of everything a contact has done with your brand. Per Gorgias' Review customer history documentation, the timeline shows two kinds of events side by side:

• Tickets — every support conversation, with an inline preview so an agent can read prior messages without opening each one, and an Expand Ticket button to reply directly from the timeline.
• Shopify order data — for connected stores, each order's number, status (Paid, Unfulfilled, and so on), date, total, and item count, threaded into the same chronological view as the tickets.

Three filters sit at the top: a Date range, an Interaction Type toggle (Tickets, Orders, or both), and a Ticket Status filter (open vs. closed) — and you can sort by Last Updated or Created. There's also a Summarize button that generates an AI summary for any ticket with three or more messages. This is the part that makes returns and subscription questions fast: an agent handling "where's my refund for order #1043?" sees the order, its status, and every prior message about it without ever leaving the profile.

Merged identities: one customer, many entry points

Here's the problem the profile is quietly solving. Tickets are linked to a contact by email address, but customers don't cooperate — the same shopper emails from a personal Gmail, then reaches out on Instagram (which carries no email at all), then buys again under a work address. Left alone, Gorgias treats those as three different people, and your agent loses the thread.

Merging fixes this by collapsing duplicate profiles into one. Per Gorgias' Merge customers documentation, the flow works like this:

1. In the ticket's customer sidebar, search for the duplicate by order number, email address, phone number, or name.
2. Select the matching profile from the results and start the merge.
3. Choose which data to keep — the fields highlighted in blue are the ones that survive the merge.
4. Click Merge Customers in the bottom-right, then Confirm.

Gorgias will also surface suggested merges automatically when it detects likely duplicates, so you're not hunting for them by hand.

One caveat worth burning into memory: the Shopify-first rule. If a customer's order history is split across two email addresses in Shopify, you should merge them in Shopify first, then merge their profiles in Gorgias — otherwise the order histories won't consolidate cleanly. And note that a merge is technically irreversible; there's an unmerge workaround, but treat merging as a one-way door and confirm you've got the right two profiles first.

The honest limits — and where an AI layer picks up

The Gorgias customer profile is a strong native feature. It's a real, unified record, the merge flow is thoughtful, and the order-linked timeline saves agents a genuine amount of tab-switching. But it's worth being clear-eyed about what it is and isn't.

• The richest profile is Shopify-gated. The order history, live status, refunds, and the order widget in the sidebar all depend on a connected Shopify (or comparable ecommerce) store. Without that connection, the profile is contact info, notes, and ticket history — useful, but not the "full customer 360" the marketing implies. Third-party data (Recharge subscriptions, Aftership tracking, Yotpo reviews) each require their own app connection.
• Merging is manual and irreversible. Suggested merges help, but a human still has to confirm each one, remember the Shopify-first rule, and accept there's no clean undo. At volume, duplicates accumulate.
• The profile displays; it doesn't reason. Gorgias will show you the order status and the ticket history. It won't read them, understand that the customer is asking to change a subscription frequency, and draft the reply. That's still an agent's job.

This last point is the seam where an AI agent layer fits — and it's the honest one. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists to do the reasoning-heavy work a static profile can't. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Gorgias you already use through a live native connector — it is not a help desk and does not replace Gorgias or its Contacts feature. Connected, Macha reads the same customer profile, timeline, and tags your agents rely on, and can look up an order or subscription through a custom tool that turns your REST API into something the agent can call — then draft or send a grounded reply that already knows who the customer is and what they ordered.

One honest contrast on cost, because it matters for ecommerce volume. Gorgias' own AI (Automate/Convert) is billed per resolution. Macha's pricing works differently: credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution — a design choice that suits automation and orchestration where outcomes vary and a single ticket may involve several steps. For how Macha's agents behave once connected, the Gorgias AI agent explainer goes deeper.

The clean division of labour: keep Gorgias' customer profile as the source of truth for who the customer is and what they've done, and layer an agent on top for the part the profile can't do — actually reading that record and answering the question fast.

FAQ

Where do I find contacts and customer profiles in Gorgias? Click Customers in the top-left of the helpdesk (or use Search and switch to the Customers tab) to open the full contact list. Click any customer to open their profile, which also appears in the right-hand sidebar of every ticket they're attached to.

What does a Gorgias customer profile show? Name, email, and phone number, editable internal notes, any custom Customer Fields your team has defined, and a Customer Timeline of tickets and — for connected Shopify stores — order data (number, status, date, total, item count).

How do I merge duplicate customers in Gorgias? In the ticket sidebar, search for the duplicate by order number, email, phone, or name, select the match, choose which fields to keep (the blue-highlighted ones survive), then click Merge Customers and Confirm. Gorgias also suggests likely duplicates automatically. Merging is irreversible, so confirm the profiles first.

Do I need Shopify to get order history on the profile? Yes. The order-linked timeline, order status, and the sidebar order widget depend on a connected Shopify (or comparable) store. If a customer's orders are split across two Shopify emails, merge them in Shopify first, then merge their Gorgias profiles.

Can I add AI to Gorgias profiles without replacing Gorgias? Yes. An AI layer like Macha connects to Gorgias as a native connector and runs on top of your existing help desk — it doesn't replace Gorgias or its Contacts feature. It reads the same profile, timeline, and tags to draft or send grounded replies, while Gorgias stays the system of record for who the customer is.

Ready to put the customer profile to work instead of just looking at it? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Gorgias in minutes.