Increasing Retention With the Klaviyo & Gorgias Integration

Customer retention is often lost through small, avoidable points of friction – unanswered questions, slow resolutions or poorly timed promotions. For ecommerce brands, these moments can directly impact repeat purchase behaviour and customer lifetime value.

If you’re an ecommerce brand on Shopify, you may well be leveraging Klaviyo and/or Gorgias as part of your tech stack. However, many brands use each platform in isolation, typically because marketing and customer service are run by different teams within a business, with different success metrics.

By connecting your lifecycle messaging on Klaviyo with your customer service activity on Gorgias, you can reduce avoidable dissatisfaction and build more consistent experiences across channels.

This article will explore in more detail how the Klaviyo & Gorgias integration works, sharing four ways it can be used to boost customer loyalty and retention.

What does the Klaviyo & Gorgias integration enable?

Traditionally, brands rely on Klaviyo to manage proactive lifecycle communication – including welcome, post-purchase, replenishment and winback flows. Meanwhile, Gorgias is used to handle reactive customer service conversations – things like order issues, returns, delivery questions and product support.

At a high level, the Klaviyo & Gorgias integration creates a two-way bridge between these two sides of your customer interactions, primarily in the following ways:

• Gorgias sends support events and ticket data to Klaviyo, allowing you to segment and trigger messaging based on real support interactions.

• SMS replies in Klaviyo can become support tickets in Gorgias, so customer questions don’t get stuck in a marketing inbox and go unanswered.

• Negative reviews – via Klaviyo Reviews – can automatically create Gorgias tickets, giving your team a workflow to rescue the relationship quickly.

• If you use Klaviyo’s Customer Hub on a Shopify storefront, you can add a “Get help” option that routes customers into the right Gorgias channel based on business hours and availability.

Four ways the Klaviyo & Gorgias integration can increase retention

1. Prevent tactless marketing during unresolved issues

One of the most common retention failures isn’t a bad offer; it’s bad timing. When a customer has an unresolved delivery issue or is actively frustrated, receiving upbeat promotional messaging can appear insensitive.

Once you sync your Gorgias ticket events to Klaviyo, you can use these as segmentation signals within Klaviyo and put in place rules to prevent this from happening. Events such as “opened ticket” or “satisfaction survey responded”  will inform your lifecycle messaging rules, enabling you to adjust communication accordingly.

For example:

a) Customers with an open ticket

For customers who have open tickets, you can suppress or adjust promotional messaging while a ticket is open. The goal isn’t to stop communication altogether, but to avoid creating a tone mismatch while a customer is actively dissatisfied or blocked.

b) Customers with tickets that remain open beyond a threshold (e.g. 24-48 hours)

Reassure your customers that they haven’t been forgotten by triggering proactive updates while an issue remains unresolved. For example, after 24 hours, send a short “we’re on it” update, link to self-service help, or offer an escalation path.

For longer delays you could even trigger an offer – framed as a service gesture, not a discount bribe – to show you understand their frustration.

c) Customers with a resolved ticket who submitted a low satisfaction response

If you’re collecting satisfaction responses in Gorgias and syncing them to Klaviyo, a low rating can trigger a dedicated follow-up process. You might choose to escalate their ticket to a senior agent for a more personal follow-up, request more detailed feedback from them to better understand the issue, or create a recovery workflow to try and win back their trust.

The goal is consistency. Customers shouldn’t receive messaging that implies everything is “business as usual” while they are actively dealing with a problem.

Take a look at this case study which demonstrates how customer segmentation within Klaviyo improved conversions by 323%.

2. Use post-resolution moments to reinforce loyalty

Improving customer support performance is closely tied to customer loyalty and repeat purchases. Once an issue is solved – particularly if it is solved well – customers are often more receptive to hearing from you again, whether that’s a link to an educational article or a relevant product recommendation.

With Gorgias’ “resolved ticket” event synced into Klaviyo, you can build a controlled “post-resolution” flow that can be branched based on the outcome.

For example, you might create the following segments based on satisfaction response:

• High satisfaction – request a review, provide product care guidance, recommend an accessory, or reinforce benefits of the purchase.

• Low satisfaction – direct them to a recovery workflow which offers personalised follow-up, escalation to a senior adviser, replacement/refund pathways or structured feedback capture.

This approach allows you to capitalise on your support interaction with the customer, and turn a potential risk into a positive moment of connection with your brand.

3. Treat SMS replies as high-intent conversations, not campaign noise

SMS and WhatsApp often drive strong engagement, but they’re also common points where automation can fail.

Replies to SMS and WhatsApps tend to represent immediate purchase intent – “when will this ship?”, “which size should I choose?”, “can I return this?”. Handled well, these interactions can prevent cancellations and reduce downstream friction, helping the customer feel connected to the brand. Handled poorly, unanswered replies can increase churn and negative word-of-mouth.

To solve this, the Klaviyo & Gorgias integration automatically creates Gorgias tickets when a shopper replies to a Klaviyo SMS or WhatsApp campaign, bringing those replies into the helpdesk workflow. The incoming messages can then be responded to directly by the customer support team within Gorgias, where they have sight of the conversation and commercial context of the customer.

This process boosts retention in two ways. Firstly, faster response times could mean the difference in closing a sale. Many SMS and WhatsApp replies aren’t classed as support tickets in the traditional sense, but can be purchase blockers: “will it fit?”, “will I receive it in time?” etc. If those questions are answered quickly, you don’t just improve conversion – you reduce future returns and frustration.

Secondly, the integration creates clearer ownership. Instead of marketing seeing replies and forwarding them manually, the question goes straight into the support workflow, resulting in fewer messages being missed.

If you haven’t yet integrated WhatsApp into your omnichannel ecommerce strategy, here is a guide to WhatsApp marketing on Klaviyo.

4. Catch negative reviews early & rescue the relationship

Negative reviews can represent both a risk and an opportunity. They are a public signal of dissatisfaction, but also a direct line to what went wrong, and a chance to fix it.

If you’re using Klaviyo Reviews, low star reviews can trigger automatic ticket creation in Gorgias, so your team can triage and respond quickly. This allows brands to create an internal feedback loop where a “bad experience” becomes a trackable support workflow – complete with tags, routing and outcomes.

From a retention perspective, this is powerful because you’ll be able to focus effort on the cases most likely to influence repurchase and reputation. It also enables retailers to respond while the customer still cares, rather than after they’ve fully churned.

In a best case scenario, the customer could even update their review because they are so happy with the resolution and service they’ve received.

Getting started with your Klaviyo & Gorgias integration

For most brands, the quickest gains come from a small number of thoughtfully built workflows. You’ll see that these align with the benefits outlined above.

• “Open ticket” suppression rule: exclude customers with open tickets from promotional campaigns and non-essential flows.

• “Resolved ticket” follow-up flow: a short sequence that thanks the customer, confirms resolution, and branches based on satisfaction where available.

• SMS reply-to-ticket routing: ensure every reply becomes a trackable, assigned conversation in Gorgias.

• Negative review ticketing: route low-star reviews into a service queue with clear ownership and response SLAs.

These four flows typically reduce friction for customers, without creating a complex dependency between teams.

Work with Swanky’s Klaviyo experts

Swanky is a trusted partner agency for both Klaviyo and Gorgias, benefiting from over a decade of experience helping ecommerce brands drive measurable results through our growth marketing services.

Our in-house team of Klaviyo experts can help you leverage the Klaviyo platform to its full potential, from integrating it with Gorgias and other platforms within your tech stack, to improving deliverability, designing campaign emails and building flows.

Get in touch with our team today for advice.