Introduction: Your Helpdesk Is Broken, But Your Customer Relationships Don't Have to Be
If you're reading this, you've probably felt the pain of a traditional helpdesk. It's that sinking feeling when a customer says, "Don't you guys talk to each other? I just explained this to someone else." It's the chaos of managing a dozen different tools for email, chat, and phone calls. It’s the rigid, impersonal nature of ticket numbers and case IDs that turn real people into reference codes.
For years, this was just the cost of doing business. But in 2026, it’s a recipe for failure.
Modern customers, especially in the US market, expect more. They expect you to know them. They expect seamless conversations that flow naturally across channels. They expect a radically personal experience. This is precisely the problem Gladly, a true next-gen helpdesk, was built to solve.
Welcome to your definitive guide to mastering this AI-powered helpdesk. We're going to take a deep dive, exploring everything from its foundational architecture to advanced Gladly best practices. But this isn't just a feature list. As experts in the CX space, our goal is to show you how to transform these features into a powerful engine for growth, loyalty, and unrivaled customer relationships.
And a quick introduction from our side: we're ClonePartner. Our entire business is built around helping ambitious brands make seamless transitions to superior platforms like Gladly. We've seen firsthand what a game-changer this platform can be, but we've also seen that the most critical moment in your entire journey is the very first step: migrating your data. Throughout this guide, we'll share our expertise not just on Gladly itself, but on how to ensure your transition is flawless from day one.
Ready to dive in? Let's get started.
I. So, What is Gladly Helpdesk, Really?
If you're asking, "What is Gladly Helpdesk?" you're asking the right question. The simple answer is that it's a customer service platform. But that's like saying a smartphone is just a device for making calls. The reality is far more profound.
What makes Gladly different from other helpdesks? It’s a complete paradigm shift.
- Traditional Helpdesks: See the world as a queue of tickets or cases. A customer sends an email, that's Ticket #123. They send a follow-up chat, that's Ticket #124. They call, that’s Case #567. The customer is fragmented, and the context is lost.
- Gladly's Modern Helpdesk Approach: Sees the world as a collection of customers. Every single interaction—email, chat, SMS, a voice call from two years ago, a Facebook DM from yesterday—is unified into a single, continuous Conversation Timeline under one Customer Profile.
Think of it less like a filing cabinet for tickets and more like a detailed relationship journal for each customer. Is Gladly a full helpdesk? Yes, and then some. It's a comprehensive, collaborative helpdesk designed not just for support, but as a central hub for all your GTM (Go-to-market) teams, including sales and customer success.
Who is Gladly for? It’s the ideal helpdesk for startups and high-growth e-commerce brands that understand customer loyalty is their most valuable asset. It’s for companies pursuing product-led growth (PLG) who need deep customer insights. It's for anyone tired of saying, "Can you give me your ticket number?"
II. The Technical Architecture: Unpacking Gladly’s Core Features
To truly master Gladly, you need to understand its engine. The YouTube deep dives and technical demos reveal a powerful, interconnected architecture. Let's break it down.
A. The Unified Customer Profile & Conversation Timeline
This is Gladly's crown jewel. It's a single, persistent profile that provides a 360-degree view of the customer.
- Contextual Intelligence: Agents immediately see lifetime value, loyalty points (like in the IVR demo), past purchases (the Andie Swim team uses this to drive a 34% conversion rate on service interactions), and even relationships (like "Julie's husband Todd").
- A Single Source of Truth: The Conversation Timeline displays every interaction chronologically. An agent can listen to a call recording from last week, read an SMS from this morning, and respond to an email, all in one continuous thread. This eliminates the #1 customer frustration: repeating themselves. As one Gladly report from 2024 revealed, 86% of customers expect conversations to move seamlessly between channels. Gladly is built for this reality.
B. Truly Omnichannel: All Channels, Natively Built
Gladly comes with all channels built-in: Voice, IVR, Email, Chat (Sidekick), SMS/MMS, Facebook Messenger, Twitter DM, and WhatsApp. This native design is a huge technical advantage over platforms that "bolt-on" channels.
- Seamless Agent Workflow: Agents use a single, consistent UI, dramatically reducing training time. One study showed agents can be onboarded in a few hours, not days.
- Effortless Channel Switching: An agent on the phone with a customer can send a confirmation SMS with one click. A chat conversation can be escalated to a voice call without losing any context.
- Unified Reporting: This is a massive win. You can finally answer questions like, "What is the true handle time for an order issue, from the first email to the final phone call?" Gladly reports give you this holistic view.
C. Gladly AI & Automations: Your Unfair Advantage
Does Gladly have AI features? Yes, and they are deeply integrated to empower both agents and customers.
- Hero AI: This isn't about replacing agents; it's about making them "Heroes."
- AI-Powered Authoring: Provides real-time, context-aware reply suggestions. This has a massive impact, with internal data showing a 90% acceptance rate by agents, meaning the suggestions are highly accurate and on-brand.
- Conversation Summaries: With one click, AI summarizes long conversation threads, including voice calls. This can reduce after-call work (ACW) by 10-50%, a huge efficiency gain.
- Sidekick (AI-Powered Self-Service): This is Gladly's intelligent chat and automation engine. It's not just a dumb bot.
- Intelligent Self-Service: It can handle complex queries like "I spilled ketchup on my wool runners, how do I clean them?" by pulling from your Gladly Answers knowledge base and using generative AI to provide a conversational, personalized response.
- Automated Workflows: Sidekick can process returns, exchanges, and order status checks by integrating with your backend systems (e.g., Shopify, Magento).
- Seamless Handoff: When an issue requires a human touch, Sidekick hands off the entire conversation context to an agent. The agent sees a summary of what was discussed, so the customer never has to repeat a thing.
- Intelligent IVR: Even the phone experience is smart. The IVR can greet a customer by name ("Hello, Julie") and offer proactive help ("I see your order shipped today... are you calling about that?").
- Gladly Workflows: You can set up powerful Gladly automations. For example: if a VIP customer messages in, automatically route them to a senior agent and apply a "VIP" topic tag. Does Gladly support email automation? Yes, through these powerful, customizable workflows.
D. Integrations & The Gladly API
Gladly’s flexible helpdesk architecture allows it to be the hub of your CX tech stack. It supports a wide range of native integrations and offers a robust Gladly API for any custom needs, enabling deep Gladly data enrichment.
III. The Critical First Step: A Flawless Data Migration to Gladly
You're excited. You see the potential. But there's one giant hurdle between your legacy helpdesk and the promised land of Gladly: data migration. How do I import my data into Gladly? This is, without a doubt, the most important and highest-stakes part of your setup.
Getting this wrong means starting from scratch. It means losing years of valuable customer history, breaking the very promise of the Conversation Timeline, and forcing your customers to repeat themselves—the exact problem you're trying to solve.
This is where an expert partner isn't just a nice-to-have; it's essential. This is our entire focus at ClonePartner.
At ClonePartner, we combine an expert engineering team with AI-driven, productized tooling to move data from any source—Zendesk, Salesforce, Kustomer, you name it—without disrupting your operations. Customers don’t have to bat an eyelid — we handle all the complex mappings, data validations, and tricky edge cases so your imports simply work. We've refined this process over hundreds of migrations, ensuring every piece of historical customer data finds its new home in Gladly's people-centered model.
The result is the best of both worlds: the speed and convenience of a product with the accountability and precision of an expert-led service.
Don't let your Gladly journey stumble before it even begins. Ensure your foundation is solid with a perfect data migration.
Learn more about our expert-led Gladly migration services here.
IV. Gladly Use Cases: From Cost Center to Revenue Engine
With a proper setup, Gladly becomes far more than a support tool.
- Gladly for Customer Support: The core use case. Unify channels, slash handle times by 15-40%, and see CSAT scores soar.
- Gladly for Customer Success: Use the rich Customer Profile for proactive check-ins and to build deep, lasting relationships.
- Gladly for Sales: This is a game-changer. Agents can identify upsell opportunities based on purchase history and use the built-in, PCI-compliant Gladly Payments feature to close sales directly in chat. Crate & Barrel, a Gladly customer, generated over $100,000 in new chat revenue in their first week using this feature.
- Gladly for Product-Led Growth (PLG): Use Sidekick to gather real-time feedback and understand user friction points directly within your application.
V. Your Playbook: Gladly Setup, Best Practices & Tips
Here's your actionable guide. How do I set up Gladly for the first time?
- Strategize First: Map your ideal customer journey.
- Execute a Flawless Migration (with an expert partner like ClonePartner): This is Step 2, not an afterthought. Your historical data is the fuel for personalization.
- Configure Channels & IVR: Connect your communication channels and design your intelligent IVR flows.
- Build Your Knowledge Base: Populate Gladly Answers with both public FAQs and internal agent resources.
- Train Your Heroes: Shift the team's mindset from "closing tickets" to "owning conversations."
What are best practices for Gladly?
- Personalize with Precision: Use the 'Details' card to wish a customer a happy birthday or reference their last purchase. Small details make a huge difference.
- Embrace Asynchronous Communication: Use SMS and email for non-urgent follow-ups to free up agents for live conversations.
- Master the Art of Collaboration: How can I collaborate with my team in Gladly? Use Tasks to assign follow-ups to other departments (like the warehouse or finance) directly within the customer's timeline. No more lost email chains!
- Let Your Data Guide You: How do I create reports and dashboards in Gladly? Regularly dive into Gladly reports and Gladly intelligence. Monitor conversation topics, channel mix, and agent performance to find optimization opportunities.
Gladly Tips and Tricks for Power Users
- Proactive Outreach: Use Gladly workflows to trigger an automatic SMS to a customer whose order has just been delivered, asking if everything arrived okay.
- VIP Routing: Use Gladly custom fields to tag high-value customers and create a routing rule that sends them to your most experienced agents instantly.
What are common pitfalls to avoid when using Gladly?
- Underestimating the Migration: Trying to manually export/import data without an expert leads to data loss and a failed implementation.
- Ignoring Self-Service: Not investing time in building out Gladly Answers means your expensive human agents are answering the same simple questions over and over.
Sticking to a Ticket Mindset: If your managers are still measuring "tickets closed per hour," you're missing the point. Shift metrics to focus on customer satisfaction, relationship building, and lifetime value.
Frequently Asked Questions
Conclusion: Your Journey to Radically Personal Service Starts Now
At the end of the day, Gladly is more than a flexible helpdesk; it's a new philosophy for customer engagement. It provides the tools and the architecture to finally deliver on the promise of truly knowing your customers and building irrational loyalty.
By embracing its people-centered design, leveraging its powerful AI and automation features, and starting with a perfect data migration from a partner like ClonePartner, you are setting your brand up to not just compete, but to win in the new era of customer experience.
Ready to see how a seamless transition can redefine your customer relationships? Explore a Gladly demo, and when you're ready to make the move, let the experts at ClonePartner handle your migration. Your future self will thank you.