Agents have Guide Viewer privileges by default. Administrators have Guide Manager privileges. You can give agents Guide Manager privileges as needed.
This article contains the following sections:
Guide user roles overview
Guide supports the following user roles with different Help Center access privileges:
- Anonymous user is anybody who visits the Help Center without signing in.
- End user is somebody who has created an account and signed in to the Help Center.
- Guide Viewer is any regular Zendesk Support agent without Guide Manager privileges. Agents have Guide Viewer privileges by default, but you can make agents Guide Managers as needed.
Light agents (Support Professional add-on and Enterprise add-on) have Guide Viewer privileges for accessing content. Light agents on Guide Lite and Professional cannot create or edit articles. Light agents on Guide Enterprise and Legacy can create and edit articles where agents have permission.
Note: Permission for agents to view and edit knowledge base articles or community posts is not part of the role permissions, but is set the article level for the knowledge base and at the topic level for community (see Setting content viewing and editing access). - Guide Manager has full privileges in Guide. All Administrators have Guide Manager privileges.
For a list of specific permissions by role, see the next section, Guide user privileges by role.
Guide user privileges by role
The following table shows Guide user privileges by role.
Article creation, management, and publishing privileges are not determined by the user's role, but are determined by user permissions. For a complete list of agent privileges granted by user permissions, see Understanding agent privileges for user management permissions.
| Permission | Anonymous user
(Anyone) |
End-user
(Signed-in users) |
Guide Viewer
(Agents) |
Guide Manager
(Admins, select agents) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Submit support requests in Help Center | X
(If anybody can submit tickets is enabled) |
X | ||
| Manage subscriptions and requests | X | |||
| Comment on articles and posts
(if enabled) |
X | X | X | |
| Add posts to the community | X | X | X | |
| Vote on articles and posts | X (if anonymous voting is enabled) | X | X | X |
| Subscribe to articles and sections in the KB | X | X | X | |
| Follow posts and topics in the community | X | X | X | |
| HELP CENTER SET UP | ||||
| Customize the Help Center | X | |||
| Manage Help Center settings | X | |||
| KB MANAGEMENT | ||||
| Enable languages for Help Center | X | |||
| Add, edit, or delete categories and sections | X | |||
| Reorder articles, sections, and categories | X | |||
| Edit or delete comments on articles | X | |||
| Create a ticket from a comment on a knowledge base article | X | X | ||
| COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT | X | |||
| Set access restrictions on any community topic | X | |||
| Add, edit, or delete community topics | X | |||
| Reorder community topics | X | |||
| Pin or feature a community post | X | |||
| Close a community post for comments | X | |||
| Edit or delete comments on a community post | X | |||
| Change status of a community post | X | |||
| Create a ticket from a community post or comment | X | X | ||
| Manage spam | X | |||
| Moderate user content | X |
Setting content viewing and editing access for agents
Guide Managers have full access to the Help Center, including the ability to view all articles in the Guide admin and the ability to add, edit, and publish all content. These privileges are not part of the Guide Viewer role for agents by default, but are set at the article level for the knowledge base and at the topic level for community.
27 Comments
Is it possible to allow access to the Submit a request page for light agents?
I have a HC set up in my sandbox and when I (as a light-agent) click the Submit a request link I'm redirected to the Zendesk Dashbord instead.
Hi Jacob!
The Submit a Request form in the Help Center is only available for end-users. Because Light Agents are considered Agents in Zendesk, the Help Center form isn't available to them and they're redirected to the agent interface to create their ticket.
Please let me know if you have any other questions!
Hi Jessie,
Thanks! I was wondering if there was some way to work around this behavior to allow some specified set of light-agents to submit a HC form and bar them from the Zendesk.
I'll look into other options for my needs.
For anyone who need to have light-agents submit requests from a Help Center, the work-around I've found is to use the Zendesk Web widget to display the form.
Instead of the New ticket tab in Zendesk.
What if I want to allow someone to be an author and manager of HC articles but not be able to change custom themes, layout, etc.? Seems like it's all or nothing...
Just echoing Joshua Bentley - the content management/discussion refereeing and the site design/admin functions do need to be kept separate. It worries me that to allow our product managers to moderate end-user content I'm going to have to empower them to wipe the whole help centre.
We've just run in to this problem as well. We really need the option to let "agents" moderate content in the community without giving them the "manager" role in Help Center. This is a really major flaw in the default model. It's also unclear to me if the Enterprise plan with granular permissions would even fix this.
Hey Gene -
Thanks for the feedback, and trust me, we hear you on the challenges that limitation poses in managing the Community. It's not fixed by the Enterprise plan; management levels simply weren't baked in to the Community platform when it was built.
We seem to have ran into a bug during this update. We haven't made any changes to Roles recently but there are some roles with "Can manage Guide" unchecked that can still add and edit articles
Hi Dj,
It seems that you already have a ticket open with us about this behavior. Since this is an account specific question, you will be notified of any progress on this ticket.
If you have any other question about your Zendesk account, you can always contact us via email at support@zendesk.com.
Cheers,
Could it be that there was a change in the permissions of the light agents just very recently (the last hours, days)?
I am doing research and calculations and just thought that I have seen not long time ago that a light agent is able to add/edit Guide articles.
<<Light agents (Professional add-on and Enterprise add-on) have Guide Viewer privileges for accessing content, but they cannot add, edit, or delete articles where agents have permission and they cannot be Guide Managers.>>
I am pretty sure this was different recently. Any news on that?
Hi Markus,
If you have Guide Legacy (which means you had Help Center before the Guide launch in May of this year), then your light agents can add, edit, and delete articles.
If you are on a Guide Lite or Professional plan (which launched in May of this year) then your light agents cannot add, edit, and delete articles.
Hope that helps clarify things!
Hi Jennifer,
it is bad news but yes it helps clarifying things. I realized why I had a different information on that - the German help page states exactly the opposite.
Hi Markus,
Sorry for the late reply here... But I'm realizing that we need to update the translations for this article. The change for Light agents is not reflected yet in the translations. I'll add it to our next loc update.
Thanks for letting me know!
Jennifer,
This has really impacted our organization in a negative way. Our light agents (which include our product managers who monitor tickets but don't handle them) have typically managed our Help Center content - they don't handle Q&A but they post updates to our product information. Is there any way to re-enable their access as a Light Agent?
Thanks!
Karie
Hi Karie,
Thanks for letting us know of the impact you're running into here. By default, light agents do not have permissions to manage help center content as noted here on our light agent permissions article. However, as you are currently using Guide legacy, the light agents on your account should have the permission to edit and comment on guide articles etc.
I'm going to create a ticket so we can discuss this further from there in regards to your account. I'll see you in the ticket. :)
Best,
Amie
Where do I find this section titled
To give agents in a custom role Guide Manager permission?
We have the Professional level Guide.
Additionally, I thought we had it so our users had a seamless experience (ie, one login for our site, help desk, and what we call our forum -- ie, guide) -
So, if they are logged into the site they are logged into the guide, just like our admin accounts. The site just went live and when on my phone I noticed guide wanted me to login although I was logged into the site. Not sure if something got messed up or ...
Any directions or best practices for our dev?
I hope I explained clearly. Please PM me for more info or email.
Hi Nightrider,
Since you are on Professional, apparently you need to set that permission individually (scroll down to Guide section), per agent on the user profile page (in Enterprise it is determined on the role level).
I haven't been able to find any detailed instructions on this, but hopefully it is easy to do once you are on the user profile page.
Hope that helps you out.
Thank you for your help.
We're finding the Guide Pricing structure regarding user roles extremely frustrating. We have 10-12 Support agents and 1-2 separate people that manage the Help Center content. The only interaction that our Support agents have with the Help Center is linking the article in their ticket responses, while the Help Center managers are writing, editing, publishing, organizing, and designing. But since the Guide pricing is tied to the number of Support Agents, to get our Help Center managers the tools they need to do their job, we would have to pay for 10-12 unused accounts worth of access to the same tools. Have there been any thoughts on making the subscriptions between Guide and Support more customizable and useful for the needs of a Support team?
Hi Cody -
This is something that the product and pricing teams are thinking about. I'll check in with them to see if there are any solutions or future changes I can share on the topic.
The new User Permissions might be worth checking out for some of you subscribing here.
We have the same issue as Cody Stephenson above.
We have a dedicated support team and only two of these are responsible for the Helpdesk.
We are currently using Zendesk support and a separate company for our Helpdesk, but would be keen to have them both with Zendesk. Paying for unneccesary licenses is a killer though.
Please consider separating the two!
Colm
Hi,
Same issue as Cody and Colm.
Nicole any updates?
Hi Ron, Cody, and Colm,
No changes have been made to the pricing structure at this point.
Hi - just echoing the same thing as Cody & Colm as well - it would be nice if licensing could be separated. Let me know if there's somewhere more constructive to provide that feedback, if there's a feature request I could vote on etc.
Thanks!
Hey Kelly,
I did some digging through our forums here and it doesn't look like we have a feedback post related to this yet! I would recommend creating a post in our Guide Product Feedback Forum along with your use case as it looks like there's others that would also be interested.
Thanks again for taking the time to share your feedback with us :)
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