In an ever changing environment agents may come and go, and when it is time for them to go how do you best maintain your support lines of communication? This article describes best practices for maintaining your lines of communication with your customers after an agent leaves your team.
The following are the steps you will want to take when removing an agent from your team:
Reassigning tickets
The first priority when an agent leaves is to make sure any tickets that were being handled by that agent are maintained by the rest of your team. Ideally, the exiting agent will be able to reassign any tickets that they have assigned to themselves before they complete their time with you. In those cases when the agent isn't able to handle this, any admin will need to reassign those tickets.
First, an admin must access the agent's profile by going to Admin icon () > Manage > People. They can then select the Assigned tickets view. At this point they have two options to reassign these tickets.
The first option is to manually assign each of these tickets, one by one, to the agents that you would like to take over the tickets.
The second option is to bulk assign these tickets to the agent(s) you would like to have take over. This can be done by selecting the check boxes next to the tickets you want to assign and then selecting the Edit(number) ticket(s) button that will appear in the upper right hand corner of your screen.
Downgrading the agent's role
When an agent leaves, you will want to maintain the information of the tickets that an agent has handled in the past. For this reason, you should not delete an agent when they leave. Instead, first downgrade and then suspend the agent's account. This way, in most cases your reporting information stays intact for future reference and any articles posted by your agent will continue to have an agent's name instead of a deleted user as its author.
Keep in mind that if you are removing the admin who originally set up your integration between a stand-alone Chat account and Support, downgrading their access may cause ticket creation to fail.
Downgrading an agent will delete their personal views and macros permanently. Please also remember to update any app/integration or API request that uses the admin credentials (Authentication for API requests). You'll want another admin to reauthorize these apps before you downgrade the admin.
To downgrade an agent's role
- Click the Admin icon in the sidebar, then select People.
- Click Agents.
- Select an agent and click Edit.
- On the agent's profile you will see the Role section on the upper left hand side.
- Select End-user from the drop-down list.
You'll see a warning screen that informs you of the privileges that will be lost by this user if you continue with the downgrade. Verify that this is what you want by selecting Yes, downgrade this user . Once you select this, your agent is no longer an agent and will no longer count towards your agent limit.

Insights users may experience issues with some reports when they downgrade an agent. Potential issues include:
- Reports that slice via user role can be affected, as the downgraded agent is now an end-user.
- Report tabs with user filtering enabled will no longer show the downgraded agent in the drop-down.
- Public reports by the downgraded agent will still be available, but private reports will disappear. Any private reports you want to keep should be saved under an active agent's account.
Enterprise customers may want to downgrade an agent to a light agent, then suspend them, to mitigate the impact on their Insights reports.
Suspending the agent's account
The final step for this process is to suspend the agent's account. This will prevent the agent from logging in to their account going forward. This can be done right after downgrading the agent, within the user profile.
- Click the Admin icon in the sidebar, then select People.
- Click Agents.
- Select an agent and click Edit.
- Click the drop-down icon at the top-right of the profile and select Suspend access.
Your agent is no longer a part of your Zendesk Support instance at this point.
46 Comments
Hey Caleb -
If the agent has any tickets that they're the requester of and you try to delete their profile your API request will fail.
If they're not the requester of any tickets but do have tickets assigned to them the API request will successfully delete that agent. Tickets that were previously assigned to the agent will now be unassigned.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
What is the appropriate way to do the following?
Currently, I have 9 active agents on the standard plan, with large ticket history. I need to switch licensing to a single user for reporting (move to 1 agent, single user) insights plan, so I can do historical reporting on the agent history/performance. How can I demote agents, keeping all of their history intact and be able to upgrade to a single user insights plan? Thank you!
Hi,
I have some agent were suspended user, and they have over 500+ closed ticket, as per another posted advices, closed ticket will not be reassign as already archived if I downgraded them to end-user, in this case, can I assume the suspended agent still shows as assignee for those ticket can we recall those closed tickets from customer organisation?
You can go ahead and downgrade the Agent, Nicole. I don't quite understand what you mean by "can we recall those closed tickets from customer organisation"? I have always just left the tickets where they were after downgrading the Agent.
Should a user reply to a solved/old ticket from a suspended agent, where will those tickets be routed?
Hey Sydney -
The ticket would remain assigned to the suspended agent, which is why we recommend the process above to remove agents.
I have a question regarding reporting. Here’s the scenario:
1. Agent left our organization
2. I reassigned all cases less than solved
3. I downgraded to end-user
4. I have not yet suspended the person
Now I am being asked to provide a report reflecting all reassignments from this former agent.
Since they are now an end-user, I am not able to filter on this agent in my reassign report.
If I were to upgrade this end-user back to agent, assuming I have an extra license to do so, would I be able to report on the ticket reassignments or has this information been lost?
April
Try this:
HOW
FILTER
@Graeme Carmichael
Thank you very much!!! This worked for what I needed, plus some additional filtering. Appreciate the assistance.
A~
Is it possible to restore access after suspending an agent account?
Elvind
Suspended Agents can be unsuspended at any time. The Agent will still have access to the same support groups as before.
Note that suspended agents still count towards your plan's agent count.
Hello,
If I move an agent to lite agent does it still keep all of the data if this agent is in a report?
Hey Christopher,
As long as the data hasn't been completely deleted this should remain within your reports. When it comes to closed tickets, this data becomes read-only and the assignee will continue to show this lite agent even after they've been downgraded.
I hope the above information helps!
Hi,
Are the steps describe in this article a good solution to remove access to tickets from agents temporarily?
I have agent accounts that I need to prevent from being able to access tickets for a few days.
Paul
Hey Paul,
Once you downgrade the agent's role to an end-user, they would no longer have access to tickets within your Support account. After a few days, you can change their role back to an agent which will give them access to tickets again.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
There is a gotcha to the "Suspend the agent's account" step that I learned of today. A suspended user not only can't log in, but also has any tickets created by them sent to Suspended Tickets.
For us this played out in the following way. An employee left our department, but not the company. As such he no longer required access to Zendesk and so we reassigned tickets, downgraded access, and suspended the account. A few weeks later, a customer emailed the employee directly asking for some help. The employee forwarded the email to the support email address for his former department, who handles those clients. However, because we had suspended the account his email didn't appear in our Zendesk queue and instead went straight into the Suspended tickets, which we didn't notice.
Is there a way to prevent logon, but not "black hole" emails that come from that person?
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