Gorgias Side Conversations & Internal Notes Explained

Internal notes: talking to your team without the customer seeing

An internal note is a message inside a Gorgias ticket that only your team can see — never the customer. It lives in the same conversation thread as customer replies, but it renders on a distinct cream/yellow surface so nobody confuses it with an outbound message. You use it to leave a paper trail of what you've tried, to hand a ticket off with context, or to ask a colleague a quick question without leaving the ticket you're working.

The mechanics are deliberately simple. Per the Gorgias Internal notes documentation:

1. Click the channel icon in the top-left corner of the message composer.
2. Select Internal note — the composer background changes color to signal you're in note mode, not reply mode.
3. Type your note (or apply a macro), then click Send.

That color change is the whole safety mechanism. A reply goes to the customer; an internal note stays in-house, and the visual cue is what keeps an agent from accidentally telling a shopper "just refund them, they're being difficult." One important constraint to internalize: you cannot delete an internal note once it's been sent. Treat notes as part of the permanent ticket record, because that's exactly what they are.

@Mentions: pulling the right teammate into the ticket

A note nobody reads is just a diary entry. The point of collaborating in-ticket is getting a specific person's attention, and that's what @mentions do. Inside an internal note, type @ followed by a teammate's name and pick them from the dropdown.

When you mention someone, two things happen, per the Gorgias docs. They get a notification inside Gorgias and an email notification, and that notification includes "a preview of the note's content, and a link to the ticket." So the mentioned agent doesn't have to go hunting — they see what you asked and jump straight to the ticket.

The genuinely useful part is the reply loop: if the mentioned user replies to the notification email, their response is added to the ticket as an internal note. A teammate can answer your question from their inbox, on their phone, mid-commute, and the answer lands back in the ticket where it belongs — no login required for that round trip. For an ecommerce team where the person who knows the answer (a fulfillment lead, a senior agent) isn't always sitting in the helpdesk, that's the difference between a fast handoff and a stalled ticket.

One quiet but important detail for anyone who watches team metrics: internal notes don't contribute to your "tickets replied," "messages sent," or "one-touch tickets" numbers in Analytics. Collaboration overhead doesn't inflate your reply stats, which keeps reporting honest — a nuance worth knowing if you also lean on Gorgias stats and reporting to judge agent throughput.

Forwarding: looping in vendors, suppliers, and 3PLs

Internal notes solve talking to your people. But ecommerce support constantly needs a fact only an outside party has — did the supplier ship the restock, will the 3PL honor a reship, what's the real ETA from the manufacturer. Gorgias handles that with ticket forwarding, which sends the conversation to any email address without giving that person a Gorgias seat.

Per Gorgias' handling incoming tickets guide:

1. In the channel selector dropdown at the top of the reply area, select Forward.
2. In the To field that appears, enter the email address you want to forward to.
3. Write your message, then click Send.

Two things make this safe to use with external partners. First, internal notes are excluded when you forward — your team's candid back-and-forth doesn't leak to the vendor. Second, you can click the three dots in the message composer to edit or remove any message replies that shouldn't be forwarded, so you're not blindly shipping the customer's entire history to a supplier who only needs one order number. And the customer can keep replying to the original ticket normally the whole time — the forward runs alongside the main thread, not in place of it.

This is Gorgias' answer to what other help desks brand "side conversations": a way to run a parallel outside thread without leaving the ticket or losing the context that ties it back to the customer's order.

Automating notes with rules and macros

You don't have to type every note by hand. Two Gorgias features let you generate internal notes automatically:

• Macros can now include an "Add Internal Note" action, so a single click both replies to the customer and drops a standardized note for the team (for example, "Escalated per refund policy — see order in sidebar"). If macros are new to you, the Gorgias macros explained primer covers the fundamentals.
• Rules support an "Add Internal Note" action that adds a note automatically in reaction to an event — useful for stamping tickets with routing instructions or flags the moment they arrive. That fits naturally alongside the broader automation patterns in Gorgias rules explained.

Used well, these keep the ticket record consistent without adding manual work — every escalated ticket gets the same note, every high-value order gets the same flag.

The honest limits — and where an AI layer fits

Gorgias' collaboration tools are solid and do exactly what they claim. Notes are auditable, @mentions notify the right person, forwarding loops in outsiders cleanly. But notice what all of it is: a faster way for a human to ask another human for information. The tooling moves the question around efficiently; it doesn't answer the question.

A few real seams for an ecommerce team:

• The answer usually lives in another system. "Where's this order?" needs Shopify or your 3PL; "did we already refund this?" needs your payments data. Gorgias will happily route the question to a teammate — who then goes and looks it up manually. Note that the richest native context (order details, revenue, deeper order actions) sits in the customer sidebar and depends on your Shopify integration and plan, so how much shows up varies.
• @mentions still cost two people's time. Every mention is one agent stopping to ask and another stopping to answer. That's the right call for genuine judgment, but a lot of "mentions" are really just lookups that shouldn't need a second human at all.
• Forwarding waits on a reply. A ticket forwarded to a supplier is now blocked on someone else's inbox, and Gorgias can't chase it for you.

This is the seam an AI agent layer fits into — and it's worth understanding the wider category of AI agents for customer service before reaching for one. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Gorgias you already use through a live native connector — it does not replace Gorgias, your inbox, or your notes and forwarding. Once connected, Macha reads and writes the same tickets your team already works: it can look up order, tracking, and account status through a custom tool that turns a REST API into something the agent can call, then post a grounded internal note or a drafted reply — so an agent @mentions a teammate to confirm a judgment call, not to go fetch a tracking number. You can read how the Macha–Gorgias integration is wired end to end, and because Macha charges per AI action rather than per resolution, the pricing scales with the automation you actually use.

The clean division of labour: keep Gorgias' internal notes, @mentions, and forwarding as your team's collaboration layer — the human record of who decided what — and let an AI agent handle the lookups and drafts that today eat an @mention or a forward. Your team collaborates on the calls that need judgment; the agent handles the ones that just needed a fact.

FAQ

What's the difference between an internal note and a reply in Gorgias? A reply goes to the customer; an internal note is visible only to your team. Gorgias shows internal notes on a distinct cream/yellow surface, and switching the composer to Internal note mode (via the channel icon) changes its color so you don't send team chatter to a shopper by mistake.

How do @mentions work in Gorgias internal notes? Type @ and the teammate's name, then pick them from the dropdown. They receive both an in-app notification and an email with a preview of the note and a link to the ticket. If they reply to that email, their response is posted back to the ticket as an internal note.

Can I delete an internal note after sending it? No. Gorgias states you can't delete an internal note once it's been sent — notes are a permanent part of the ticket record, so write them accordingly.

How do I loop in a vendor or 3PL who doesn't use Gorgias? Use Forward: in the channel selector at the top of the reply area choose Forward, enter the external email, and send. Internal notes are excluded from the forward, you can edit or remove specific messages via the three-dots menu, and the customer can keep replying to the original ticket normally.

Can AI collaborate inside my Gorgias tickets without replacing Gorgias? Yes. An AI agent layer like Macha connects to Gorgias as a native connector and works inside your existing tickets — drafting grounded replies and posting internal notes with order or account context — while Gorgias stays the system of record. It supplements your notes, @mentions, and forwarding rather than replacing them.

Ready to spend less time chasing answers and more time deciding? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Gorgias in minutes.