What does the Customer Support FTE do on top of Gorgias?
The Customer Support FTE is the support employee inside ftes for Commerce, the ftes.ai e-commerce application, and it works on top of Gorgias rather than replacing it. Gorgias keeps doing what it does well: holding every conversation across email, chat and social, and delivering each reply on the channel the customer used. The Customer Support FTE brings what a helpdesk's own automation cannot know: the real state of the order in Shopify, whether the shipment is late against your own handling time, the return, the stock, the customer's value and history, and the order's margin before any goodwill is offered.
In the ftes.ai org chart this work belongs to the Order Support FTE, the Digital FTE accountable for post-purchase questions. The rule is the same everywhere in ftes for Commerce: the employee proposes with evidence, and a person decides, at whatever autonomy level the owner has set. Each new ticket is filed under one of fourteen topics, and sensitive subjects such as a chargeback, a legal threat or an injury always go to a person with a short summary.
How do you connect Gorgias to ftes for Commerce?
Connecting Gorgias to ftes for Commerce takes one of two routes, both in the app at ecommerce.ftes.ai: on the Integrations page, or in the Customer Support FTE's Settings, which are the same connection. The first route is Connect with Gorgias: you name your Gorgias account, you are sent to Gorgias to sign in and press Allow, and you come back connected. Installing ftes for Commerce from the Gorgias App Store starts exactly the same flow. ftes for Commerce never sees your Gorgias password.
The second route is a Gorgias API key, which you create in Gorgias and paste with your account subdomain and email. Either way, the token or key is encrypted at rest, is never sent to the browser and is never written to a log. Gorgias access tokens last 24 hours, and ftes for Commerce refreshes them automatically, so the connection keeps working without anyone signing in again. The first sync brings in your tickets, agents and satisfaction surveys, and from then on Gorgias is read every 15 minutes. Plans and the token wallet that meters the AI work are described on ftes.ai/pricing.
What is each Gorgias permission for?
The Gorgias app ftes for Commerce asks for the smallest set of scopes the Customer Support FTE needs, and each one maps to something it does. Reading lets it understand your helpdesk; writing happens only when you approve it, or on a topic you have switched to autopilot.
- openid, email and profile: identify the Gorgias account that connected; offline: keep the connection alive with a refresh token.
- users:read: your agents, so the agent's results sit beside your team's and hand-offs go to the right person.
- tickets:read and tickets:write: read tickets and messages, and post approved replies, internal notes and ticket updates such as status, tags, assignee and snooze.
- satisfaction_survey:read: CSAT, measured the same way for the agent and for your team.
- macros:read and macros:write: use your macros as approved answers, and save an approved reply as a new macro.
- rules:read: show your Gorgias rules read-only, with a warning where an auto-reply would answer before the agent.
Which autonomy level should the Customer Support FTE start at?
The Customer Support FTE has an autonomy ladder of four levels: Suggest, Draft, Approve to send and Autopilot. It starts at Suggest, where it files tickets and watches but drafts nothing and writes nothing to Gorgias. At Draft it writes replies for you to read. At Approve to send each reply waits in Approvals for one click. At Autopilot a reply goes out on its own only when every guardrail passes. You set the level overall and for each topic, and you can lower it at any time.
A sensible start is Draft for a week: read what the agent would have said, then move the calmest topics, such as where is my order, to Approve to send. Topics you mark never-automatic stop at Draft whatever the overall level. Sensitive subjects, angry customers, VIPs if you choose, and languages the agent does not answer always go to a person with a three-line summary and the next step. Setting the autonomy back to Suggest stops it acting on its own at once.
How do you approve your first AI-drafted reply?
Approving a first reply in ftes for Commerce happens in the Customer Support FTE's Approvals tab, and every decision is written to the activity log. The panel shows everything needed to decide in one place.
- The customer's message, with the new words first and earlier emails folded away.
- What the agent found: the order, the shipment and the return, each fact with its source.
- The draft in your brand voice, its confidence and why, and any banned words.
- The cost of any goodwill offer against the order's margin, under your ceilings.
- Approve, Edit, Send back with a reason, or Reject, which hands the ticket to the person mapped to its topic.
What does the Customer Support FTE never change?
The Customer Support FTE never writes to Shopify or to Loop Returns. Everything that would change an order or start a return is prepared, not done: a refund, a cancellation, an address change, a re-ship, a discount code or a new return appears in the Inbox as Prepared for you to do, with every detail filled in and a link to do it in Shopify or Loop Returns, then Mark done. That keeps money movements and order changes with a person, where your own policies and permissions already apply.
In Gorgias itself the Customer Support FTE writes only replies and internal notes, ticket updates, a retried or cancelled send, and macros saved from approved replies. Gorgias sends each message asynchronously, so a reply shows Queued until Gorgias confirms it Sent, or Failed with Retry. Nothing else in your helpdesk is changed, and your Gorgias rules stay exactly as you configured them.
What does ftes for Commerce measure from Gorgias?
ftes for Commerce measures the Customer Support FTE with the same figures as your human agents, read from Gorgias: first response time, resolution time, one-touch resolution, reopens, CSAT and hand-offs, side by side, with the trend and the best and worst topics. Hours saved is shown with its basis, the tickets the agent resolved times your team's handle time, so the figure can be checked rather than taken on trust.
The same Gorgias data feeds Team Performance, where every agent is compared fairly and every contact reason is grouped in Voice of Customer. The Insights tab turns recurring problems into fixes with an owner and a money figure: a size chart that reads small, a warehouse over its handling time, or a policy that two pages state differently. Each insight links to the page in ftes for Commerce where the fix is made.
What happens to your data when you disconnect Gorgias?
Disconnecting Gorgias from ftes for Commerce revokes the token at Gorgias and deletes it from ftes for Commerce, so the Customer Support FTE stops reading and writing at once. A pasted API key stays in force until you remove it as well. Gorgias keeps everything that lives in your helpdesk, including every reply already sent and every macro already saved, because that data is yours and stays in Gorgias.
Data read from Gorgias is used only to run the Customer Support FTE and Team Performance for your store. It is never sold, never shared with another customer and never used to train AI models. The ftes.ai Privacy Policy lists, in its section on Gorgias, the data that moves each way between ftes.ai and Gorgias, when it moves, and how tokens are handled; read it at ftes.ai/privacy-policy.