Gorgias Voice Explained (Phone Support for Ecommerce)

What Gorgias Voice actually is

Voice is a paid add-on channel that sits alongside Email, Chat, and Social inside Gorgias. It is not bundled into the base subscription — you enable it separately, per integration, and it bills on its own usage model (more on that below). Once it's on, your team can make and receive phone calls without leaving Gorgias, and every call lands in the ticket queue with the caller's full history attached.

The core idea is that a call is not a special, siloed thing — it's just another way a ticket gets created. Per Gorgias' Voice add-on pricing documentation, "a ticket is considered a Voice ticket when at least one phone call takes place between a customer and your helpdesk." That single design decision is what makes Voice worth understanding: the phone stops being a black hole and becomes part of the same record your agents already reason over. If you're new to the platform generally, our what is Gorgias primer covers the broader help desk before you layer a phone channel on top.

How call-to-ticket works

The value of Voice is the automatic conversion of a live call into a durable, searchable ticket. Here's the shape of it:

1. A customer dials your support number (or an agent dials out). The call is answered in Gorgias, in the browser — no external softphone required.
2. Gorgias opens or attaches a ticket. If the caller matches an existing customer, the call joins their timeline next to prior emails and chats; if not, a new ticket is created.
3. The interaction is logged. With recording and transcription enabled (toggled under the integration's General tab), the call audio and a text transcript attach to the ticket, so the next agent isn't starting blind.
4. The ticket persists. Even after the call ends, the ticket stays in the queue for follow-up — a refund to process, a subscription to pause, an order to re-ship.

Critically, Gorgias counts each ticket that contains a phone call as one billable Voice ticket, no matter how many phone calls are exchanged in that conversation. So a WISMO ("where is my order?") call that turns into three follow-up calls over two days is still a single Voice ticket. Billable events include an agent answering an inbound call, a customer leaving a voicemail, and an agent making an outbound call that connects to a customer or voicemail.

Setting up a phone number and Voice integration

Setup lives entirely inside Gorgias settings, and it's a two-part job: get a number, then wire up how calls behave.

First, add a phone number. Go to Settings → Channels → Phone numbers → Add Phone Number. You'll name it, pick a country, choose a type — Local, National, Mobile, or Toll-free — and select an area code where one's required. Some countries need a request form rather than instant provisioning, so international numbers can take longer.

Then, create the Voice integration. Go to Settings → Channels → Voice → Add Voice Integration. Here you give the integration a name and emoji, pick a Default Business hours schedule (customizable later), and — the important choice — select a routing behavior:

• Basic Routing — calls ring straight through to available agents.
• Send calls to Voicemail — every call goes to a recorded voicemail.
• IVR — callers navigate a keypad menu before being routed.

After you click Create Voice Integration, Gorgias also spins up a shared View in the ticket sidebar that filters open Voice tickets, so your phone queue is visible at a glance.

IVR and call flows: routing without a call center

If you pick IVR routing, you get access to Gorgias' call flow editor — a visual builder for how callers move through menus, queues, holds, and voicemail. Per Gorgias' IVR documentation, each IVR menu supports up to 8 options, and callers can press 9 to return to the previous menu. You can nest menus into multi-level trees, so "press 1 for orders, press 2 for returns" can each branch into their own sub-menu.

The editor does more than key-mapping. It can branch on business hours (an after-hours caller hears a different flow than a 10am one), route to specific queues with overflow rules and callback requests when agents are busy, hand off to SMS or an external number, and fall through to voicemail as a final catch-all — which Gorgias recommends adding as the last step so nobody hits a dead end. Custom greeting audio should be mono, 16000 Hz, 64 kbps for clean playback.

For an ecommerce brand, a sensible starter flow is: greeting → business-hours check → "press 1 for order status, 2 for returns, 3 for everything else" → route each to the right queue → voicemail fallback after a wait timeout.

Gorgias Voice pricing: per ticket, not per minute

This is the part most write-ups get wrong, so it's worth stating plainly: Gorgias Voice is billed per ticket, not per minute. There is no clock running on call duration. As the Voice add-on pricing docs put it, once a ticket becomes a Voice ticket, "you can have multiple calls at no extra charge." A 45-second WISMO call and a 20-minute troubleshooting saga each count as exactly one Voice ticket.

What each Voice ticket actually costs depends on your subscription tier — Gorgias directs you to the Billing & usage page in your account to see your specific rate, and doesn't publish a single flat number because it scales with your plan and volume. Voice is marketed heavily toward Shopify brands, and it leans on that integration: agents can see the Shopify customer timeline and even create orders mid-call.

Here's how the model compares to what people often assume:

Because Voice usage stacks on top of your plan's ticket allotment, it's worth reading it alongside the full Gorgias pricing breakdown before you switch it on — a busy phone line can move the needle on your bill in a way email volume doesn't.

The honest limits — and where an AI layer picks up

Voice is a genuinely good native channel. Call-to-ticket is clean, the IVR editor is more capable than most standalone dialers, and keeping call history in the same record as email and chat is exactly right. But be clear-eyed about what it is and isn't.

It's an add-on with real cost. Voice isn't free, and unlike email it bills on usage — every answered call is a billable ticket. For a low-volume brand where phone is a "nice to have," that math may not work.

It still needs a human to answer. IVR routes the call; it doesn't resolve it. The menu can send a WISMO caller to the "orders" queue, but a person still has to pick up, pull the tracking number, and read it out. Voice moves the work to the right agent — it doesn't do the work.

And it's most valuable if you're on Shopify. The order-timeline and create-order-mid-call features that make Voice shine are Shopify-oriented; on other stacks you get the channel but less of the ecommerce context.

This is the seam where an AI agent layer fits. The category of AI agents for customer service exists to do the reasoning-heavy work a phone menu can't — and Macha is one such layer that runs on top of the Gorgias you already use through a live native connector. Macha does not replace Gorgias or its Voice channel; it reads and writes the same tickets, including the ones Voice creates. When a call becomes a ticket, Macha can triage it by intent, draft a grounded reply for follow-up, and look up live order or subscription status through a custom tool that turns your backend API into something the agent can call — deflecting the routine questions before they ever ring the phone. See how the Macha–Gorgias integration connects, and note the billing contrast: Gorgias' own AI is billed per resolution, while Macha credits are consumed per AI action — you can compare the model on the pricing page. (Gorgias' native AI agent and Chat channel round out the deflection story on the text side.)

The clean division of labour: let Gorgias Voice own the phone channel and the call record, and layer an agent on top to answer the questions that never needed to be a phone call in the first place.

FAQ

Is Gorgias Voice billed per minute? No. Gorgias Voice is billed per ticket, not per minute. A ticket becomes a billable Voice ticket when at least one phone call takes place, and multiple calls within the same ticket don't cost extra. Your per-ticket rate depends on your subscription tier — check the Billing & usage page in your account.

Is Voice included in my Gorgias plan? No. Voice is a paid add-on that you enable separately from your base subscription, per integration. It's marketed primarily toward Shopify brands and leans on the Shopify timeline and order-creation features.

How do I set up a phone number in Gorgias? Go to Settings → Channels → Phone numbers → Add Phone Number, then name it, pick a country and type (Local, National, Mobile, or Toll-free), and select an area code. After that, create the Voice integration under Settings → Channels → Voice → Add Voice Integration and choose a routing behavior.

How many options can a Gorgias IVR menu have? Each IVR menu supports up to 8 options, and callers can press 9 to return to the previous menu. You can nest menus into multi-level trees and branch on business hours, route to queues with callback/overflow, or fall through to voicemail.

Can I add AI to Gorgias Voice without replacing Gorgias? Yes. Macha connects to Gorgias as a native connector and runs on top of your existing help desk and its Voice channel — it doesn't replace them. It reads the tickets Voice creates, triages them by intent, and can resolve the routine order-status questions through a custom tool, while Gorgias stays the system of record for your calls.

Ready to answer the routine calls before they ring? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Gorgias in minutes.