This article describes how to use Zendesk Admin Center to view and change roles for team members. It also describes how to use Admin Center to activate and deactivate product access.
This article includes the following sections:
About team member roles and access
Admin Center provides a central location for setting a team member’s roles and product access across multiple Zendesk products. Previously, you had to navigate across multiple locations to set roles or activate product access for staff members who used more than one Zendesk product.
A team member is anyone you add to a Zendesk account who is not an end user. For example, in Support, a team member can be an account owner, an administrator, an agent, a light agent, or a user with a custom role. Team members are also sometimes referred to as staff members.
Admins, in any product, can set product access for most team members, including themselves. Only admins in Support can set product access and assign roles for all team members in Support. For example, a Chat admin with light agent permission in Support can still make product access and role changes for team members in any product except Support.
Admins can set roles for any team member, except themselves. They need another admin to do that. The account owner can set access and team member roles for any user, including themselves.
The following video shows you how to open one of your team member's profiles and manage their role settings. You can allow or block access to different products for each agent. You can also specify what level of permission they have for each product.
Assigning roles and access for Explore (1:10)
Product dependencies for roles and access
Your options for assigning roles vary depending on the product type. For more information, see About team member product roles and access.
Some team member roles can't be set from the drop-down because there are product and plan dependencies. For example, if you have a Zendesk Suite Enterprise or Enterprise Plus plan, roles for Guide and Explore can’t be changed because they are dependent on Support custom roles.
If you only have a Zendesk Sell plan, without a Zendesk Suite or Support plan, one Support seat is included for administrative functions with a role of Contributor. Explore roles are defined by custom Sell roles for Enterprise plans, or can be manually configured on other Sell plans.
If you have Zendesk Sell as well as a Zendesk Suite plan, in most cases Guide and Explore roles are still dependent on the Support role. However, in some cases, such as when you set the Support role to Light agent or you have a Zendesk Suite Professional plan or lower, the Explore role can become dependent on the Zendesk Sell role.
Opening the team member's profile
There are several ways to open a team member's profile in Admin Center, depending on which product you’re using. Here are some examples:
To open a team member's profile from admin center
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Team members.
- Locate the team member or use the search to find the team member.
- Click the team member to access their settings.
To open a team member's profile from Support
- In Support, click the team member to open their user profile.
- In the menu on the left, click Manage in Admin Center under Role.
The team member’s Roles and access page opens.
To open the page from Sell
- In Sell, click the Settings icon (
), then select Manage > Users.
- Search for the name of the user you want to edit.
- In the search results, click the name of the user you want to edit, then click the
Edit profile button.
The agent’s profile in Admin Center opens in a new tab.
- Click the Roles and access tab.
Setting team member's roles
To assign a role to a team member in Admin Center
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Team members.
- Locate the team member or use the search to find the team member.
- Click the team member to access their settings.
- In the Role column, use the drop-down fields to select the new role you want to
assign to the team member.Note: You must be an admin in Support to set a team member's role in Support.
- Click Save.
- Repeat this procedure for each user whose role you want to change.
Setting Viewer roles for Guide and Explore
Team member roles you can set for Guide and Explore include a Viewer role you can use to grant access without providing full agent permissions. For example, the Explore Viewer role allows staff members (including light agents) to view dashboards shared with them, but they cannot create queries and dashboards. The Guide Viewer roles provides staff members with the same permissions as end users. They can't be granted create, edit, and publish privileges. See About team member product roles and access.
Activating and deactivating product access
Activating product access typically requires a license (seat). Deactivating access frees up a license. To make sure you don’t exceed the number of licenses you have purchased for a product, Admin Center shows when your subscription limit is reached.
To activate or deactivate product access for a team member
-
In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Team members..
- Locate the team member or use the search to find the team member.
- Click the team member to access their settings.
- In the Access column, select the products you want to activate for the team
member and deselect the products you don't want the team member to access.
- Click Save.
- Repeat this procedure for each user whose access you want to set.
Limitations
You can use Admin Center to manage team member roles and product access. Product-specific settings are still managed separately within each product. For example:
- Adding end users
- Downgrading users from a team member to an end user
- Deleting team members (with the exception of Chat 4-only and Sell-only accounts). Chat 4-only accounts and Sell-only accounts can delete team members from Admin Center.
24 comments
Erica M (staff)
As an administrator, I am unable to change the Roles and Access products for my own profile? I need to sometimes change my role for Talk from Admin to Team Lead but need another Admin to change the Access on my own profile. Is there a way to make the changes myself? Currently with the Pro plan.
0
Dave Dyson
Hi Erica –
The account Owner can set Roles and Access for any user, including themselves (I'll see if we can get that information added to this documentation).
So if you're an admin and the owner, you should be able to set it yourself. If you're an admin but not also the owner, then the owner or another admin can set it for you. If needed, as an admin, you could temporarily promote an agent to admin, have them change your role for your, and them revert them back to their former agent status.
0
Frédéric Mauroy
Hello all,
we have the "Support Suite Pro" with 10 seats. I need to give access to a new staff member to manage Guide articles, but we reached a limit:
So I thought that by removing this right to existing members that do not really need it, I would be able to give him the proper access. But even after waiting a few minutes and several Ctrl-F5, the items are still disabled in the list as above. Am I doing something wrong? Is this info stored in cache for a long period of time maybe?
Thanks for your help
0
Dave Dyson
Hi Frédéric,
Have you gotten this squared away? I see that all ten of your paid seats are in use, either by Support Admins (including your account Owner) or Guide Admins (Guide Admins use a paid seat even if they do not have access to Support). For more information on Guide roles, see About staff roles in Zendesk Admin Center
0
Frédéric Mauroy
Hi Dave, thanks for your quick reply.
We have 10 agents in Zendesk Support, and the new user is such an agent already. Could this mean a non-agent user has been set as having Guide access? Does suc h type of user exist? If so, is there an easy way to find this account? Or could it be something else? Why do we see "staff" in some places and "agent" in others? Are they the same user types?
When I edit a user that was admin in Guide yesterday, I can still put him back as admin or agent. Why can't I do the same with another agent? If the quota is reached, the option should be disabled on all users, no? Seems to me there is a discrepancy somewhere here. Any clue?
Thanks!
0
Dave Dyson
HI again Frédéric –
So you have a total of eight seats that are being used by Support Admins, and two that are currently being used by Guide Admins but only Contributors in Support, for a total of ten paid seats. Your other Contributor agents who have Viewer permissions in Guide do not take up a paid seat.
That's why you can modify the staff role of your Guide Admins - they already count towards your ten paid seats. If you want to change the role of one of your Contributor/Viewer agents, you'll need to either free up an agent seat (e.g., by downgrading one of your two Contributor/ Guide Admin agents to Contributor/Viewer, or by adding additional paid agent seats.
Does that clarify things?
0
Frédéric Mauroy
Thanks a lot for the clarification, I must have missed something when reading about how seats are counted.
I removed a user that didn't need admin rights anymore and I've been able to add the new account to the Guide agents successfully.
Best regards!
0
Frédéric Mauroy
Possible improvement to Zendesk ;-)
Have a list of all users taking seats, and for what part of the system.
In our case we had only 10, so several clicks were needed to isolate those, but imagine consumers with many more seats...
Just my 2 cents.
0
Liam McFarlane
Please change it back, it takes significantly longer to open the Admin Center each time we need to update someone's role within Support profiles. The drop-down list of roles was great, why did you change it to this? You've literally made it less intuitive.
2
Evan Bovie
Heads up that the video embedded in this page is too small to decipher the content and it cannot be made fullscreen.
0
Lisa Kelly
Thanks, Evan. The video should be easier to view now. Click the image and it will open in a new window.
1
Leah Hanson
As the Admin who manages the Agents and Admins on our account, the workflow to edit user roles is excessive and unnecessary. I have to switch between Support and Admin Centre up to 3 times to edit a team members role.
If I start in Zendesk Support these are the steps I have to follow:
1: Click on the Setting cog
2: Click on Go to Admin Centre
** Switch to Admin Centre**
3: Open list of Team Members
4: Select to Edit the relevant team member
** Switch to Zendesk Support **
5: Click Manage in Admin Centre
** Switch back to Admin Centre **
6: Edit roles as required and Save.
Why wouldn't you either:
- Have a list of team members in Support so you can open them and click Manage in Admin Centre from there
OR
- When you press Edit in Admin Centre it takes you to the Roles area from there.
2
Dave Dyson
I realize the irony of my request here, but for the best visibility to our product team, would you mind creating a post in our Feedback - Admin Center community topic, using this template?
0
Leah Hanson
Hi Dave,
I have added the post as requested.
0
Dave Dyson
0
Frank Ledwidge
Hi guys,
We are starting to provide some of our non-support colleagues with Light Agent access. These agents may be in a group of their own. I would like them to be able to view ALL tickets. What we're finding is, that to see any ticket within our instance, we have to ensure they reside within all of our groups.
Under 'Understanding what light agents can do' above, "Light agents can... view tickets assigned to groups they're in or view all tickets". This led me to believe that our light agents should see all tickets by default. But, when I look through the comments, I can see that there are settings particular to Enterprise (Roles) which we do not have, which allow you to edit the Light agent role itself (see comment by DJ Buenavista Jr. Feb 10, 2022).
Is this correct? My current workaround is to ensure that all of our light agents are within every group we have set up for organisational purposes, which is not ideal.
Thanks,
Frank
0
Dane
Only Enterprise plans have the option to modify the ticket access for light agents. Please refer to Configuring light agent permissions with Suite Enterprise. For lower plans, it is limited to the groups they are a part of.
0
Vincent Aditya
Hello, I want to ask regarding the limitation of access. I want to limit my agent's access so they cannot delete a ticket no matter what. But without changing their ability to reply to tickets, use tags, and edit user notes.
We wanted to create a custom role but we are unable to do so as the options are not available in our end
1
Lisa Kelly
Hello Vincent,
There are two options. See below for details.
1
Vincent Aditya
Hello Lisa Kelly
Thank you for your reply, We are a professional account, but we have un-ticked the agents can delete the ticket box and yet our agents can still delete tickets and mark them as spam. Is there another way to do it ?
0
Lisa Kelly
Hi Vincent,
If disabling the Agents can delete tickets and redact content setting isn't working on your account, I recommend contacting Zendesk Customer Support. It should work as expected.
0
Akanksha Shukla
Hi All,
I am looking for a solution where the edit or update access lies with the assignee of a ticket only. No one should be able to update or edit the ticket.
Any solution for the issue or suggestions for third-party solutions will be appreciated.
Thanks in Advance.
0
JR Lausin
There's no option yet to restrict a ticket update and edits to it's assignee as ticket assignee can be manually assigned to any agents as long as they're not restricted and be an assignee on a ticket and can edit and update ticket. But you might want to consider creating a private group. When a group is private, only agents from that group can view tickets assigned to it.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408831313050-How-can-I-prevent-agents-in-one-group-from-seeing-another-group-s-tickets-
Sincerely,
0
Zachary Bender
When creating a role in Zendesk and giving that user the permission to manage reports and dashboards for groups they are assigned to why cant they pull reports on the guide area? In order to pull reports on the guide area do you have to have full reporting and analytics permission?
0