Question
How can I determine who takes up an agent seat in my account?
Answer
Anyone who is an agent in any capacity takes up an agent seat, including administrators and the account owner. Even suspended agents take up a seat. To free up that license, downgrade agents to end users before suspending their accounts.
This excludes light agents and contributors, who don't take a seat. However, contributors, who are also Chat agents, Guide agents, Explore Admins or Explore Editors, take up an agent seat. While light agents can be Guide agents and not consume a seat, they will consume a seat if they are Chat agents, Guide agents, Explore Admins or Explore Editors. For example, an account on Zendesk Suite has five agent seats. If the account has one admin, three agents, and ten light agents, we would think that they have one available agent seat. However, one of the ten light agents is also a Chat agent, who takes up the final agent seat, so the account cannot add additional agents.
There are roles that require a Support seat depending on the product. For a complete list, see this article: Managing agent seats for Support.
For more details on roles, see the article About team member product roles and access.
3 comments
Akanksh Narayana
Hello,
I have few questions regarding light agents and collaboration add-on.
1) Is there a way to check if the light agent are also chat agent through the support API? The get users API has a role_id field that tells me whether an agent is light_agent or chat_agent, but not both.
2) Is there a way for me to check if the collaboration add-on is purchased for an account via the support API?
Thanks in advance!
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William Grote
I was told you could clone light agent role and edit to better segment them using custom light agent roles (by group or organization)
Yet when I do this, ( copy the light agent permissions identically in a new role and change the name, it seems that this new role does indeed require a seat since it shows my available seats as zero?
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Dwight Bussman
HeyO Akanksh
I'm afraid neither of the features you mention are available via our Support API. You could potentially pull the chat-agent status using the Chat API and the AGENTS endpoint documented here: https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/chat/agents - but that requires a separate API call, which is likely to require special authentication as documented here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115010760808-Chat-API-tutorial-Generating-an-OAuth-token-integrated-Chat-accounts-
William,
It looks like you're already working with a member of our support team on this, but I believe that only the system-created "Light Agent" or "Collaborator" roles would allow you to create users without taking one of your agent seats. Any user within a custom-role would require an agent seat.
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