Question
How can I determine who takes up an agent seat in my account?
Answer
Anyone who is an agent in any capacity, including administrators and the account owner, takes up an agent seat, with the exception of light agents, and agents within the contributor role.
There are roles that require a Support seat depending on the product. For a complete list, see this article: Managing agent seats for Support.
Suspended agents take up a seat. To free up the seat, Zendesk recommends downgrading agents first before suspending their accounts.
Light agents who are also Chat and Guide agents also take up an agent seat. 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. This takes up the final agent seat, so the account cannot add any additional agents.
For more details on roles, see the article About team member product roles and access.
3 Comments
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!
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?
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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