The Zendesk Admin Center provides a central location for setting a team member’s roles and product access across multiple Zendesk products. A team member is anyone you add to a Zendesk account who is not an end user. Team members are also called staff, admins, and agents.
This article includes an overview of the team 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 and can also manage Talk settings, regardless of their Talk role. | Administrator |
| Agent (Team, Growth, Professional) | Can view and update tickets. Admins can control which tickets each agent can view and update. | Agent. No change. |
| Contributor (Sell and Chat Phase 4 only) | Can provide limited support by viewing and adding private comments to tickets in their groups. | Contributor. No change. |
| Legacy agent | Any agent on an Enterprise plan without a custom role assigned. | Legacy agent. No change. |
| Light agent (Collaboration feature) | Can view and add private comments to tickets. Admins can control which tickets each light agent can view and update. | Light agent. No change. |
| Custom roles (Enterprise and Enterprise Plus) | Admins can define their own agent roles. Role settings control which tickets an agent can view and update. | Custom roles. No change. |
About light agents and contributors
Light agents and contributors are similar roles, but with a few important differences:
- You must have a Suite Growth plan or above to have light agents.
- Contributors cannot access tickets outside their groups (Assigned tickets only or Tickets in agent's group). Light agents can access tickets outside their groups depending on what their admin has set for them (Assigned tickets only, Tickets in agent's group, Tickets in agent's org, All tickets).
- Contributors do not require a paid seat and you can add as many as you want. Light agents are purchased and have limits, depending on your plan type.
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). The Guide Agent role does not consume a seat when used in conjunction with the Light agent seat. However, it does consume an extra seat when used in conjunction with the Contributor seat. |
Agent. No change. |
| Viewer | Can view and comment on articles. (The team member will have the same
permissions and access as an end user.) The Guide Viewer role does not consume a seat when used in conjunction with a free Support seat such as Contributor or Light agent. |
None. This is a new role. |
Note: Although the Guide role name has changed from Guide Manager 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.
Note: Support
Admins can also manage Talk settings, regardless of their Talk role.
| 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. If an agent has a custom role and the role has the Manage channels and extensions permission enabled, Support and Talk agents can make changes to Talk settings. | ||
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. |
30 comments
Rachael Kolman
For Talk, it would nice to have another option for role. We have a variety of people who we'd like to have live listening to calls who don't need the access to update Talk Admin Features.
0
Gravity CX
Am I correct in saying:
Suite Professional Plan
Scenario 1
Added an agent with the following permissions:
This agent can not add cc's to tickets if the cc'd person they are trying to add doesn't already exist in the account. ie: they can't add users…
Scenario 2
Changed agent to the following permissions:
This agent can add cc's to tickets (if the cc'd person they want to add doesn't already exist. ie: they can add users)
Questions:
On the non Enterprise plans, the list of permissions is basically hidden and we can't see what they can and can't do.
0
Ilya Novikov
Hello,
Please help me to understand - we have a “Team” plan (with Support, Guide and Explore. We don't have a Chat).
I assigned a “Contributor” role to a few staff members. But after that, I couldn't assign a tickets to them because they not listed in the list of assignee.
Please clarify what the “Contributor” role means for the “Team” plan in Zendesk Support.
Thank you in advance.
1
Hendrik Müller
We notice from time to time that some agents are downgraded to legacy agent despite of they had another role before. Is there a reason for that?
0
Overhaul Admin
Hi guys!
I had a call with a user and he told me that before on Zendesk he was able to jump into chat, on the red box that highlighted appeared a message saying “If you would like to chat start typing”.
Now this message no longer shows; just the operator's profile can interact with the chats.
0
Hannah Lucid
Is there a way to set a default agent role? Right now ours defaults to contributor and we'd really like it to be a custom role we've setup for a majority of our agents.
0
Ivan Miquiabas
Thanks for reaching out! Yes for as long as they are associated in a group where they are a part of.
Cheers!
0
Chad Susa (Gravity CX - Zendesk Partner)
My Sell roles only lets me add an Admin or User, not an Agent. I'm assuming that Sell Agents are the same as Sell Users?
(Side note: Not sure why the Light Agent role is in a different language)
0
Chris Reid
Can contributors access shared views if they are apart of the Group that the view is associated with?
0
Colleen Hall
Hey Franki,
We recently introduced the ability for admins to view and edit all macros in their account, including agents' personal macros, using the Zendesk API. Please see the announcement and Zendesk's API endpoint for macros for more information! There are plans to include this functionality in the Admin UI later this year.
0
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