Fastpath: Admin Center > Account > Roles and access
The Zendesk Admin Center provides a central location for setting a staff member’s roles and product access across multiple Zendesk products. A staff member is anyone you add to a Zendesk account who is not an end user.
This article includes an overview of the staff roles you can set in Admin Center and compares them with the legacy roles that were previously available within each product.
This article includes the following sections:
Support roles
The following table shows Support roles available in Admin Center. For more information, see Understanding Zendesk Support user roles and Creating custom roles and assigning agents.
| Role | Description | Legacy role |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | Can manage all Support settings except billing. | Administrator |
| Agent | Can edit tickets within their group. | Agent. No change. |
| Contributor (Chat Phase 4 only) | Can provide limited support. | Contributor. No change. |
| Chat-only agent | This role is not supported. Use the Contributor role. | Chat-only agent. |
| Light agent (Collaboration add-on) | Can view and add private comments to tickets. | Light agent. No change. |
| Custom roles (Enterprise) | Admins can define their own agent roles. | Custom roles. No change. |
Guide roles
The following table shows Guide roles available in Admin Center. For more information, see Understanding Guide roles and privileges.
| Role | Description | Legacy role |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | Can manage all settings and permissions in Guide. | Manager |
| Agent | Can create, edit, and publish articles (if enabled by an Admin). | Agent. No change. |
| Viewer | Can view and comment on articles. (These are the same permissions as an end user, but applied to a staff member.) | None. This is a new role. |
| The Guide Viewer role does not consume a seat when used in conjunction with a free Support seat such as Contributor or Light agent. | ||
Note: Although the Guide role name has changed from Guide Manger to Guide Admin, references to Managers in user segments and management permissions still exist in accounts created prior to the name change.
Chat roles
The following table shows Chat roles available in Admin Center. Chat Phase 4 roles are managed in Admin Center. For more information, see Understanding default roles in Zendesk Chat and Creating custom Chat roles and assigning users.
| Role | Description | Legacy role |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | Can manage all Chat settings and provide chat support. | Admin. No change. |
| Agent | Can serve chats and provide chat support. | Agent. No change. |
| Agent (limited) | Can serve social messaging conversations and chats only. | None. This is a new role. |
| Custom roles (Enterprise) | Admins can define their own Chat roles. | Custom roles. No change. For Chat Phase 3, custom roles are still managed on the Chat Dashboard. |
Talk roles
The following table shows Talk roles available in Admin Center. For more information, see Giving agents access to Talk.
| Role | Description | Legacy role |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | Can manage all Talk settings but cannot make or receive calls. Does not require a Talk seat. | None. This is a new role. Previously, this was implied from the Support Admin role. |
| Team lead | A Talk admin who can also make or receive calls. | None. This is a new role. |
| Agent | Can make or receive calls. | Agent (Temporary change). Agents will not be able to view the Talk real-time dashboard and will have to be upgraded to Talk lead or Admin. |
| The Talk Admin role does not consume a seat when used in conjunction with a free Support seat such as Contributor or Light agent. | ||
Explore roles
The following table shows Explore roles available in Admin Center. For more information, see Giving agents access to Explore.
| Role | Description | Legacy role |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | Can manage all settings and permissions in Explore. | Admin. No change. |
| Editor | Can create and manage dashboards, queries, and datasets. | Editor. No change. |
| Viewer | Can access shared dashboards. | Viewer. No change. |
| The Explore Viewer role does not consume a seat when used in conjunction with a free Support seat such as Contributor or Light agent. | ||
Sell roles
The following table shows Sell roles available in Admin Center. For more information, see Understanding access levels and privileges in Sell.
| Role | Description | Legacy role |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | Can manage all settings and permissions in Sell. | Admin. No change. |
| Agent | Can manage leads, contacts and deals. | Agent. No change. |
8 Comments
Is there an option to allow for a Support/Guide Enterprise plan to set a staff members as being Guide Viewer (no support role) in order to accurately track as a staff member for KB article viewer metrics? It seems like you'd have to grant light agent access or pay for a license here in order to account for this with the above model.
Hello Dan Cooper,
Currently it is not possible to have a staff member be a "guide only" agent. Unlike Chat, where an agent can be a "chat only agent" where they don't have access to support or other products and just work out of chat, agents do have to have a Support license to have a Guide role. This is not a new feature, Support and Guide were intertwined before the switch to managing roles in the Admin Center. That being said it is excellent product feedback! I encourage you to share a product feedback post with a bit of context on the workflow, pain points, business impact etc. of how having the split roles would be helpful. You can do that here: Feedback on Guide.
Thank you!
Thanks as new Explore datasets are becoming available to show article view data, this becomes a bit more useful to be able to call out who is a staff member but not someone that is actively working in Zendesk. Article hits from internal team members would be nice to segment and I was pointed toward the new Guide Viewer option, but since it was always paired with support in the past, I figured I'd ask.
Hello Dan Cooper
I'm not sure this is exactly what you're looking for, but, when using the dataset to make your own article views reports, you'll be able to use the "user role" attribute to filter out agent views or differentiate what type of visitor the views are associated with. You can play around with the same attribute in the Answer Bot or Knowledge Capture datasets as it is in both of those as well. (This dataset is still in the early access program stage).
I hope that helps!
Elissa,
The Knowledge Base EAP dataset that I started going down this line of questioning around. We have some content that I'm seeing flagged as End-user (signed-in) but I know that it is capturing our internal staff members that aren't part of our Zendesk user base. This s a result of our internal communications letting our teams know about these customer resources. What I was hoping to find is a way to flag certain users that I don't expect to be Zendesk users as known staff that really are end users, but would skew view metrics when we are trying to understand the effectiveness of a new release of help center content.
The new Guide Viewer role was presented as a potential option, but I'd have to grant licenses to get this metric, and it adds Support permissions I don't want to add to these users. In addition, that would give me a slice of users that are bucketed in Staff member, but when content gets released for internal usage (via user segments) to those end users, I would then lose visibility into understanding agent vs end user views in a different lens. What I really need to know is who is a staff member, that is not a Zendesk agent. It doesn't sound like this feature exists today, at this point with the recent changes in roles and datasets I'm trying to re-establish my foundation for what is possible today and what is a feature request moving forward. Sounds like I'm in feature request territory.
Hi Dan Cooper
Got it! That does make sense. Filtering out "end-users" that are simply non-agent members of your staff is definitely a use case that is hard to tease out. You're right that you're in feature request territory there! :)
Hi,
The Talk roles make no sense at all? What is the advantage here over previous roles?
One key feature our managers have asked for is to be able to override agent status when they forgot to go offline etc. , I was hoping some permissions would enable them that access without giving them full access to Talk Admin?
Hi Adrian,
I recommend posting this request on our Community site:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/360000029887
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