Best practices for removing agents

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:

• Reassign the agent's tickets
• Downgrade the agent's role
• Suspend the agent's account

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.

Note: Admins and agents cannot view a list of the apps that other users are authorized to use. Agents can see a list of the apps they are authorized to use from their user profile, under Security settings > Third-Party Applications. Before removing an agent, make sure they are not relying on Zendesk-authorized use in other apps, if they are remaining with your company.

To downgrade an agent's role

1. Click the Admin icon in the sidebar, then select People.
2. Click Agents.
3. Select an agent and click Edit.
4. On the agent's profile you will see the User type section on the upper left hand side.
5. 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.

Note: Simply downgrading the agent does not change your agent count, you will still be charged for the same number of agents until you change your subscription, which can be done by the owner of your account in Admin icon () > Settings > Subscription.

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.

If your Zendesk plan includes lights agents, you 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.

Note: Suspending an agent's profile will not automatically remove them if the number of agent seats is decreased. You must downgrade the agent first.

1. Click the Admin icon in the sidebar, then select People.
2. Click Agents.
3. Select an agent and click Edit.
4. 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.