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 an account with Chat, Sell, or Suite to have access to the Contributor role in Support. Any Suite Growth or above account can 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. |
21 Comments
Hi
I'm not sure if it is the right place to ask but it is quite hard to see information about staff member role. So regarding staff member, is there an available API calls for staff member role? similar to what agent or administrator can do with API token key. I look up the documentation but nothing said about staff member. Please let me know if you have any information.
Thank you.
Honestly, I don't understand the difference between a contributor and a light agent. Can someone clarify this?
Hello @...,
A good guide can be found here:
Creating custom roles and assigning agents
Contributor:
If you have a Sell-only account, existing Sell users will be added to a Support account as contributors.
If you have a Chat-only Phase 4 account, and later create an integrated Support account, existing Chat agents will be added to your Support account as contributors. For more information, see Creating agents and departments in the Zendesk Chat Help Center.
Light-agents:
Light agents can be added separately with the collaboration add-on, which is included in our Growth, Professional and Enterprise plans. So for them, you would not need a seat in either Sell or Chat, but they would be added separately. They would also not be reserving a seat, but because of that would have limited functionality.
Hope that answers your question.
Hi, I'm looking for some more precise answers about what Contributors can access.
"...for instance, contributors can view some tickets, but cannot respond or otherwise interact with them."
This seems unnecessarily vague—*which* exact tickets can the Contributor role view? Tickets assign to their group? Tickets with some other qualifier?
Is there a more exhaustive list in an article somewhere that details exactly what roles in the Professional plan can and can't do apart from ticket access? For example, the Agent role in the Professional plan, what can and can't they do with other aspects of Support such as configuration, user profiles (create, view, edit etc), Organisation profiles etc. Also, can they see tickets that they are a follower on or cc'd on?
I've tried searching but only found this article and the article Understanding Zendesk Support user roles that uses the word 'may' but is not definitive.
Many thanks :)
Hello, Chad!
This list is what we currently have with regards to user roles. If we could improve on this list, we'd like to get your feedback on it, too. Agent roles and permissions depend on the account itself, if they are given access to tickets outside their group, if they can view other macros, edit them, etc. If there's any missing point here, we'd look into it for you and have it addressed to our documents team.
Thanks!
Hey team,
I have the same question has Ben Fulton. The documentation I can find around the "Contributor" role is vague, with this line – contributors can view some tickets, but cannot respond or otherwise interact with them – being used in this comment section and another article.
Exactly which kinds of tickets can the Contributor role view?
Hi,
do I understand correctly, that if I want for example allow the Customer Care managers to edit Macros for their teams, I need to give them an Administrator role so they are able to do almost everything in the given Zendesk instance (which is not safe)?
There is mentioned that Custom roles are in Enterprise, but I do not want to believe that such a basic feature is only in top price plans (we are currently on Suite Professional). :)
Thanks a lot!
Hi Jaroslav, thank you for your question!
Regular Agents are able to create Macros, but only for their personal use. The ability to create Macros for other teammates is indeed reserved only for Administrators. The other option is, as you mentioned creating a custom role, but custom roles are reserved for the enterprise level subscription.
I can confirm that creating Macros for other team members is only available for Administrators on your current subscription.
I hope this was helpful!
We have the growth suite. I'm finding it very difficulty to see who is technically an agent and who isn't. When you search in people inside admin portal, it aggregates light agents, contributors, admins, etc and calls them all agents under their profile photo in the list. This is very confusing. Is the only way to know who is registered as an agent to go into their profile and check their permissions individually? Does an agent count as an agent across all platforms of the suite? (ie agent for guide but same person contributor for support counts as 1 agent ?).
Thank you!
Hi Silas,
We are working to improve this experience in the future however as of this time, you are about right that you will need to go into the User Profile directly and check which roles he has for each product.
As for your other question, this should help - What counts as an agent seat? and Managing agent seats for Support.
If a Contributor submits a ticket, and they are sent a CSAT, are thy able to give feedback or will access be denied like that of an Agent or Light Agent?
Thank you
Dante Zanoni
Great question! Only the requester of the ticket will be able to rate their experience with a ticket. Followers/CC's will not be able to get access to this functionality.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Thanks Brett Bowser.
What if the ticket requester is also a Contributor (Zendesk role)?
If the ticket requester is also a contributor they should still get the option to rate the ticket. As long as they are an end-user on the account and not another agent who is a contributor.
"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."
Pretty sure you meant to say Manager, not Manger. Christmas is coming up soon though... ;)
Thank you, Nicholas!
It's fixed now.
I'd like to give access to all tickets to several Light Agents in our company. For full agents, I see how to do this in the admin center. However, for light agents, the same option does not seem to exist. I can only let them see tickets from their groups. This article suggests that allowing a light agent to see all tickets is possible. Can you please let me know how to do that?
Thanks,
Bill
Hi Bill,
You set ticket access permission as part of the Light agent role in Enterprise plans. See screen capture below.
See Managing custom roles for details.
Hey, everyone! I reached a point where I'm not sure if there's a possible solution or workaround.
It is common that agents proactively identify the need for a new macro and request the creation to an admin since they can only create individual ones.
That requires a certain amount of work outside of Zendesk: they'll usually create a doc file with the text they need, and share it with an admin who will then copy-paste it into a new macro and make it available for other users.
My point is, I do appreciate reviewing each macro before making it available, but the work to get it done could be simplified if, as an admin, I could access their personal macros and edit, or at least create a copy.
I don't seem to have access to it, so I tried to enable agents to create shared macros and I see here this is Enterprise only. Even so, that would have been a workaround, a full solution is the admin having access to all information, no exception. That kind of access wouldn't only facilitate macro creation but also allow some management over what agents are creating, I don't want them to be allowed to create and use an individual macro containing incorrect information, for example, and there's nothing I can do to prevent it.
Hey Francesca Roig,
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.
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