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 User type section on the upper left hand side.
- Select End-user as the new user type.
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.

Explore users might 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.
Enterprise customers may want to downgrade an agent to a light agent, then suspend them, to mitigate the impact on their Explore 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 as an agent going forward. This can be done right after downgrading the agent, within the user profile. After you downgrade and suspend the agent's account, they will only be able to access tickets they are assigned to as the requester.
- 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.
53 Comments
What is the difference between suspending a user, and deleting a user? I guess should an agent who left be deleted, or suspended?
Hi Steven,
Suspending a user keeps all their information in your Zendesk, but prevents them from logging in. Deleting a user removes their profile completely, although their tickets and Help Center posts will remain.
As recommended in this article, it's best to suspend the user, rather than delete them.
HI There
If I downgrade a user from Administrator to End User will this affect any help centre articles they have published? Will these articles still be available for our end users to view and administrators to edit?
Thanks in advance.
Ian
Hi Ian!
Changing the user role is not going to have any impact on the articles those users have published. They'll still be available with the same view/edit permissions.
Looking for some advice here. I need to downgrade an agent who left us, and she has 300+ solved tickets that have yet to close. What's the best practice for getting these to a new home, while still being able to report that these tickets belonged to the exiting agent at one point, all while preventing this agent from signing into Zendesk?
Hi Justin!
There are several approaches here; first thing you would want to do is suspend the profile. After that the user will no longer have access to Zendesk.
I would suggest when you are reassigning these to another agent you could add a tag, something like - agentName_reassign - this would allow you to create an Insights report filter to report on tickets that used to be assigned to X agent.
Terry, that's a perfect solution. Thanks a ton!
Hi there,
I hope that somebody can give me a hand with this. I need to downgrade some agents to End-user but before that I'm trying to give their tickets a new home by reassigning those tickets to other agents. Unfortunately, I can't reassign their closed tickets with an automation since according to Zendesk, closed tickets are archived and we can't modify them. What is the best practice in this case then?
Hi Trang -
Can you provide more detail about your use case?
It's true that you cannot make changes to a closed ticket. However, you won't lose those tickets once you downgrade those agents. They'll still show up in records and reporting.
Is End-User still an option in the latest Zendesk. I'm trying to downgrade before suspending:
Update: It's not an option in the drop-down if you click Edit on the list of people, but if you go to their actual profile, it is. Leaving this post up for documentation.
I have an agent who was assigned one of our chat positions. I cannot remove the chat capability from his agent profile. I thought it might be because he was suspended so we reinstated his record but it still doesn't work. When I try to downgrade him to an end user the box pops up with the warning and we accept yet it does not change his status. There is an empty box in the right hand corner with a red circle and a red ! in it but no message.
After being reinstated the it says that he is a restricted agent.
What can we do to remedy this?
Also, when the agent was in the suspended state it was still counting him as one of our chat agents and not letting me assign the role to someone else.
Hi Stacey!
I see one of your colleagues was able to contact our support team and perhaps resolve the issue. If you need any more help with this, feel free to submit a ticket at support@zendesk.com.
Ok there's a huge problem with the instruction "selecting the Edit (number) ticket(s) button" ... the typical experience in Zendesk is to clickon the downselector (the button with the down arrow). It's not at all obvious that there are two buttons:
Perhaps the down arrow should also link to the "edit" functionality.
my option to downgrade or to remove the agent is disabled. See the below image. can someone guide me how to delete a agent who has left my organisation
Krishnakumar
It looks like you are selecting the edit email menu.
To downgrade an agent, look for the Role selection higher up the screen.
To delete the user, it is a different menu again. This time towards the right hand side.
Hi, If I would downgrade a former admin to an end user, will all macros or triggers this admin have created remain or will they be removed?
Hi,
If I want to downgrade 400 agents from Staff to End User, can I use the API instead? Otherwise I will have to do this one by one.
Thank you,
Heather
@Mathias,
I believe downgrading an admin will affect integrations they authorized but not macros or triggers, but I would test it on the Sandbox just in case.
found this API query to be helpful to downgrade Agents(staff & staff report) to End users
POST api/v2/users/create_or_update_many.json
Body
{
"users":[
{"id":"(add agent id)", "role":"end-user"},
{"id":"(add agent id)", "role":"end-user"}
]
}
Thank you
Bharath Kashyap
Hey,
We find that when we downgrade Agents to End-Users, all of that Agent's solved tickets get re-assigned to another Agent.
Is there anyway to prevent this from happening? We would like to keep those tickets assigned to the Agent for reporting purposes (90% of those tickets will not be re-opened).
Hi Ashwin
These tickets need first to be in the status Closed for them to not be reassigned. Before downgrading the agent, you can create an automation like Ticket Assignee is (Agent) and Hours since assigned is greater than 1 and then action Ticket: Status is Closed. This will close all tickets assigned to this agent (more than an hour ago) when the automation runs (every hour). After all their tickets are closed, you can downgrade the agent without fear of the tickets being reassigned
Hope this helps!
Is there a way to bulk remove all the CC's the separated person may be tied to ticket wise?
Hi Kris! There's nothing that'll do that out of the box, although it might be possible using the API. For what it's worth, as long as the user doesn't have access to that email anymore they won't see any notifications, so it's not strictly necessary to remove them.
i have several suspended agents who have left our company. (all over 1 year ago) Do i have to delete them to use their seat for new agents?
Hi Linda, you dont have to delete them but you have to downgrade them to end users.
Hi
We have an agent that is leaving our organization in two weeks. I downgraded her from Agent to an End User. My question is a bit like the one posted by another member above:
We find that when we downgrade Agents to End-Users, all of that Agent's CLOSED tickets that are reopened by customers (when they respond to an email after the ticket status changed to 'CLOSE') are getting reassigned to another Agent in her group. We don't want them to go this particular Agent in her group. His first name starts with the letter 'A' so I'm assuming the algorithm goes to the first person in her old group and assigns it to them.
Is there a way to create a rule or trigger that assigns these reopened tickets (status = CLOSED) to a specific Agent?
@Linda - If you have already demoted these agents to end-users their agent licenses are available for someone else to use. If their Role is still an agent role, you will need to demote them, and then the licenses will be available to be assigned to a new agent.
@Janet - I need to clarify the status of these tickets...a Closed ticket can't be re-opened. Are the tickets you're referencing Solved? How did you re-assign the suspended agent's tickets when you downgraded her role?
Hi @Jessie
You are right. The ticket was 'Solved', not closed. The agent's tickets were not reassigned. Maybe that's my problem. I did not reassign the tickets before downgrading the agent's role. I think you've answered my question.
Hey Janet -
Sounds like you've got things sorted, but let us know if you have any further questions!
If you delete (or downgrade or suspend) an agent who has active tickets using the API, what happens to their tickets? Or does the API request fail?
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