Account ownership is managed in Admin Center. You must be the current account owner to change account ownership. There can be only one account owner at a time. If you aren't the account owner, you can find the account owner and request they make the change.
Zendesk can't change the account owner for you. If you can't find the account owner, work with your IT administrators to access their email address and initiate a password reset. If you can’t resolve this, contact Zendesk Customer Support to initiate a security review.
This article includes the following topics:
Transferring account ownership
Only the current account owner can transfer ownership to another user. When the current owner is still available, transferring ownership is simple. By setting another admin to the account owner role, the previous account owner loses access to all subscription-related pages such as Invoices and Payment.
To transfer ownership to a different user the new owner must be a current admin on the account. If you need to add the new account owner, see Adding agents and administrators.
When you change the owner of your account, integrations that were set up by the previous account owner may break. The new account owner might need to reauthorize integrations.
To transfer ownership to a current administrator
- In Admin Center, click
Account in the sidebar, then select Billing > Contacts.
- Click the Account owner tab.
- Select an admin from the Account Owner drop-down list. You must have at least one other admin to see the list.
- Click Save.
To transfer ownership to a new admin when no agent seats are available
If you need to add the new owner to the account, and no agent seats are available, the current owner can edit their own user profile to make the transfer.
- In Zendesk Support click the current owner's profile icon in the upper-right corner of the page header and then select View profile page.
- In the profile's email field click add contact and enter the new owner's email address.
The current owner will receive an email that this new address has been added.
- After the current owner receives the email, return to the current owner's profile in Support.
- Click the dropdown icon on the new email address and select Make primary contact.
- Delete the old owner's email address from the account.
The account and profile now belong to the new owner.
- Reset the account's password and update the other account information as needed.
Note: If you don't want to change the email address of the current owner profile, you can submit a request to Zendesk Customer Support to see if it's possible to add a temporary agent seat to your account to create a new user profile.
Finding the account owner
If you don't know the owner of your account you can view the roles assigned to your users to find out.
To find the account owner
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Team members.
- Search through the list of team members.
The team member who is the account owner will have an Administrator (Owner) role.
Note: Zendesk can't change the account owner for you. If the current account owner is no longer available, work with your IT administrators to access their email address and initiate a password reset. If you can’t resolve this, contact Zendesk Customer Support to initiate a security review.
12 Comments
I just went through this with our account. It was a little lengthier than I had anticipate. We only have 2 seats and I wanted to switch the ownership from an admin to a contributor. Long story short, you have to update the owner, downgrade an admin, upgrade a contributor and then switch them to owner. Note, we could not do this version which is what we had originally thought we could do.
Note: If you do not want to change the email address of the current owner profile, you can submit a request to Zendesk Customer Support and we can assist with adding a temporary agent seat to your account to create a new user profile.
It says the request has to come from an email address in the company's domain. I assume this means we have to email it in, but the 'Zendesk Customer Support' page doesn't give an email option. Please can you advise how we do this?
por favor necesito ayuda
necesito recuperar una cuenta
If you are having issues signing in to your account, you can reset your password. If you are having issues receiving the password reset email, see this article: I am not receiving my password reset email.
For all other issues signing in, you may check out I am having trouble logging in to Zendesk.
when you transfer ownership to another member does the billing admin automatically change on the system to the New person ?
Hi Roz, yes, once you transfer the ownership to another member, the account owner should be receiving the invoices going forward unless you want a different email address listed. You can also check who receives the invoices by going to In Admin Center, click the Account icon in the sidebar, then select Billing > Invoices > Recipients Tab.
Thank you! :)
Sorry if a silly question, but: will changing the account owner also change the account owner on any existing Sandboxes?
Hi Bill Reed thanks for reaching out! There are no silly questions here :)
Great question actually! I can confirm that changing the account owner of the production account will NOT change the account owner of it's sandboxes. :)
Hope this helps!
Does this include the case when the account ownership is transferred from one organisation to another? We are taking over the support for a client and their existing support organisation are transferring the account ownership to us.
So if I understand this correctly, if my VP of Sales (the current owner) makes me (an admin) the account owner so I can work on integrating Zen with our other systems, then she will have to reauthorize all the functionality I've set up!? ... What is the rationale behind this?
It's a huge pain point for us right now, and I hope I'm missing something because this setup doesn't make sense -- your buyers (account owners) are execs. They aren't the ones managing the day-to-day operations of a CRM.
Can you recommend a workaround? Thanks.
Account owner having to pay for an Admin licence is stupid.
I'm the business owner, I don't use Zendesk but I'm the one who pays the bills but I need to pay for an admin licence, why?
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