Understanding and setting light agent permissions

All Suites

Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus

Support with

Collaboration add-on

Summary: ◀▼

Light agents let you give selected team members limited ticket, Help Center, reporting, and app access so they can add private comments, share expertise, and work on approved tasks without full agent permissions. You can control what they can view, edit, export, and assign, including tickets, brands, custom objects, suspended tickets, and analytics, based on your plan.

Note: Most Zendesk Suite plans automatically include a default number of light agents based on your plan type, but you can buy more light agents if needed. These restrictions do not apply to legacy plans or add-ons.

Suite Team plans offer light agent seats as an add-on.
Suite Growth plans include up to 50 light agents.
Suite Professional plans include up to 100 light agents.
Suite Enterprise plans include up to 1000 light agents.
Suite Enterprise Plus plans include up to 5000 light agents.

Light agents have limited permissions but can stay informed about tickets and, when needed, provide subject matter expertise and advice by adding private comments to the ticket. Ticket comments by light agents are private, including the first comment of any tickets they create. However, when a light agent is the ticket requester, and they're not a member of the group or brand, their private comment will be converted to public.

To assign a light agent role, see Setting roles and access in Zendesk Admin Center.

This article contains the following sections:

Understanding what light agents can do
Configuring light agent permissions

Important: You are prohibited from using the API or any Software to effectively provide light agents with access, functionality, or permissions that they are not otherwise permitted to use or access in the Zendesk Support Agent user interface (as set forth below).

Understanding what light agents can do

Light agents have the following access and permissions.

Area	Light agents can...	Light agents can't...
Tickets	View either tickets assigned to groups they're in or view all tickets Make private comments. On Enterprise plans and above, if they're the ticket requester and lose access to the ticket because they're not a member of the group or brand, their private comment will be converted to public. Be the ticket requester Edit ticket properties at the time of ticket creation Be CC'd on tickets. End users won't be able to see light agents who are CC'd on a ticket Be added as a follower and add other agents as followers Create tickets on behalf of existing end users. The end user won't be able to see the ticket until an agent adds a public comment. Edit ticket properties for tickets they're requesters on after the ticket is created Add, access, and download attachments Create, reply to, close, and reopen email-based side conversations Add and remove tags from tickets where they're the requester. They can also bulk add tags where they're the requester but cannot bulk remove tags. Use agent email forwarding to forward an email to your support address, creating a ticket with a private comment. Reassign tickets to another agent in any of the light agent's groups, if they are the requester. Respond to an approval request if designated as the approver	Be assigned to tickets Change the ticket status, unless they're the ticket requester Reassign tickets to another group, unless they are the ticket requester Edit ticket properties, unless they're the ticket requester CC agents or end users other than themselves, except for when they create a ticket on behalf of someone else via email Use the @mention feature Respond to CSAT surveys Create, send, or be assigned side conversation child tickets Use agent email forwarding to forward an email to your support address, creating a ticket with a public comment Create or withdraw approval requests View highlighted entity values or redaction suggestions View the pages viewed by the requester in the customer context panel
People	View user profiles View the Customers page, regardless of their ticket access (Suite Growth and Professional plans only)	Edit user profiles Assume a user's identity Change a user's password Create new end users View a user's device information
Help center (not available in Team plans)	View areas of the help center knowledge base and community that are restricted to agents Add and edit articles in the knowledge base where agents have permission Add and edit posts in the community where agents have permission.	Be a Knowledge admin On Growth and Professional, it's possible to make a light agent a Knowledge admin but doing so uses a seat. View article revisions
Reports	(Professional and Enterprise plans only) View dashboards that have been shared with them in Zendesk. External link sharing is available only on Enterprise plans. Create, edit, and delete reports and dashboards.	Manage administrative settings and permissions for analytics.
Views	See views Filter views	Create or edit views
Business rules	Apply macros Light agents can't use a shared macro that applies an action that they don't have permission to do. Light agents can access the macro, but if they try to apply it, it won't work. (non-Enterprise plans) View triggers and automations	Create, view, edit or delete macros. Create, edit, or delete triggers and automations. On Enterprise plans, light agents also can't view triggers or automations. Typically be used as conditions in business rules For example, you can't create a ticket trigger that notifies the assigned agent when a light agent adds a comments to a ticket. However, you can define trigger conditions that identify when the ticket requester is a light agent.
Channels		Serve a chat or messaging conversation Respond to calls Manage channels
Mail API		Use the Mail API
Apps	Use most installed Zendesk apps within Support Perform permitted actions on their tickets in the Zendesk Support Mobile app

Configuring light agent permissions

After you understand when to use the light agent role and what they can do, you can configure some of the permissions. The permissions available depend on your Zendesk plan. If a permission can't be edited, it appears as read only (grayed out) when editing the role.

To configure light agent permissions

In Admin Center, click People in the sidebar, then select Team > Roles.
Click the options menu () next to the Light agent role, then click Edit.
Under Tickets, select an option for Tickets they can access:
- Requested by end users in their organizations for light agents to access only tickets requested by end users in their organization. This also means the light agent won't be able to update organization fields for end users or lookup relationship fields that point to organizations.
- Within their groups
- (Enterprise plans only) Within their groups and all public groups
- (Non-Enterprise plans only) All tickets, including suspended tickets
- (Enterprise plans only) All within their brand membership, including those in private groups
Select an option for Brands they can assign tickets to:
- Only assign tickets to brands they belong to
- Assign tickets to any brand
(Enterprise plans only) Select an option for Manage suspended tickets:
- Not allowed
- Recover or delete, which includes exporting the suspended tickets list
Under Custom objects, define light agent permissions for each custom object: View, Edit, Add, or Delete.
(Enterprise plans only) Under Agent workflow, set CSV Export permissions.
When selected, light agents can export CSV files, which contain an entry for each ticket in the view, along with its associated ticket information.
Select an option for Analytics:
- No access
- View dashboards for light agents to view dashboards shared with them.
- Manage reports and dashboards for light agents to create, edit, and delete reports and dashboards.
- (Enterprise plans only) Manage reports, dashboards and dataset permissions for light agents to manage administrative settings and permissions for Explore
Click Save.