When an agent leaves your team, it's important to maintain your lines of communication with your customers. This article describes best practices for removing agents from your Zendesk account.
Follow these steps when removing an agent from your team:
Reassigning tickets
The first priority when an agent leaves is to make sure any tickets that were being handled by that agent are maintained by the rest of your team. Ideally, the exiting agent will be able to reassign any tickets that they have assigned to themselves before they complete their time with you.
In cases when the agent isn't able to handle reassigning their tickets, an admin will need to reassign those tickets. You can reassign any tickets that are less than closed. You cannot reassign closed tickets, so the agent will remain the assignee of any closed tickets.
To reassign an agent's tickets
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Team members.
- Select the agent.
- In the upper-right, click Manage in Support.
Alternatively, you can click Go to user profile under the table.
- On the Tickets tab in the Assigned tickets view, do one of the
following:
-
To manually reassign tickets to a new agent one-by-one, open each ticket, and in the Assignee field, select the agent to which you want to assign the ticket.
- To bulk assign these tickets to a new agent, select the check boxes next to the tickets you want to assign, click Edit(number) ticket(s), and then in the Assignee field, select the agent to which you want to bulk assign the tickets.
-
- Click Submit to update the ticket.
Check Explore reports and dashboards
If the agent you're downgrading or removing created Explore dashboards, the dashboards are only accessible to other users if the dashboards were shared with them. If the dashboards were not shared with anyone, and the agent who created them is downgraded or removed, the dashboards are no longer available, even to the account owner.
Any scheduled dashboard deliveries created by the agent are also removed and no longer available for review. You can review the agent's scheduled dashboard delivieres before downgrading them.
Any reports that the user created will remain accessible to anyone with view or edit access to Explore reports.
You may also want to check your Support dashboard and export an agent's customer statisfaction (CSAT) scores before downgrading their role. Once an agent is downgraded, their CSAT data is not retained and your historical CSAT reporting is affected. See Exporting dashboard tabs and reports.
Downgrading the agent's role
When an agent leaves, you will want to maintain the information of the tickets that an agent has handled in the past. For this reason, you should not delete an agent when they leave. Instead, first downgrade and then suspend the agent's account.
In most cases, your reporting stays intact and any articles posted by your agent will continue to have an agent's name instead of a deleted user as its author. Note that aliases aren't preserved when users are downgraded; instead, their alias are replaced with their profile name.
Keep in mind that if you are removing an admin who originally set up your integration between a stand-alone Chat account and Support, downgrading their access may cause ticket creation to fail. Also, if you're downgrading an admin, remember to update any app/integration or API request that uses the admin credentials (Authentication for API requests). Another admin will need to reauthorize these apps before you downgrade the admin.
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Team members.
- From the list, click the agent you want to downgrade.
- In the upper-right, click Manage in Support.
Alternatively, you can click Go to user profile under the list.
- On the agent's profile, set the User type to End user.
You'll see a warning screen that informs you of the privileges that will be lost by this user if you continue with the downgrade. Verify that this is what you want by selecting Yes, downgrade this user . Once you select this, your agent is no longer an agent and will no longer count towards your agent limit.
Explore users might experience issues with some reports when they downgrade an agent. Potential issues include:
- Reports that slice via user role can be affected, as the downgraded agent is now an end user.
- Report tabs with user filtering enabled will no longer show the downgraded agent in the drop-down.
If your Zendesk plan includes light agents, you may want to downgrade an agent to a light agent, then suspend them, to mitigate the impact on their Explore reports.
Suspending the agent's account
The final step for this process is to suspend the agent's account. This will prevent the agent from signing in to their account as an agent going forward. This can be done right after downgrading the agent. After you downgrade and suspend the agent's account, they will only be able to access tickets they are assigned to as the requester.
To suspend a user from your account
- In Support, click the
Customers icon (
) in the sidebar.
- Locate the agent who was downgraded to an end user and click Edit.
- Click the drop-down icon at the top-right of the profile and select Suspend
access.
42 Comments
Hi everyone,
There has to be a better way to do this, changing the role of the agent to end user changes all of the historical data.
All the tickets that the agent has handled are now shown as an end user, therefore, all the reports are changed as anyone would normally filter by role.
How is this possible? Why the data isn't retained as it was before the change?
Thank you
There is a double negative in the statement calling out a critical piece in this guidance.
It's imperative that we downgrade first and then suspend:
Note: Suspending an agent's profile will not not automatically remove them if the number of agent seats is decreased. You must downgrade the agent first.
I'm sorry to hear that you're having this issue with downgrading one of your agents! I have created a ticket for you so we can investigate that issue and the ticket number for that is 9887043.
Thanks for your patience here and we'll chat soon!
The recommendation is to downgrade an agent to a suspended end user but for the Zendesk clients who use Explore and have agent lights then it is better to downgrade an agent to a suspended agent light so as not to impact our Explore statistics. But in this case a Light Agent licence, even if suspended, counts as one licence.
I wouldn't mind demoting an Agent or Lighter Agent to End User, if there was no Explore impact.
But as there is, Zendesk finally forces its customers to keep Agent and Light Agent left as suspended light agent, which counts as a license. It just doesn't seem right to me to pay for inactive users with suspended licenses identified and not used.
When you delete a user, all the closed tickets associated with it can still be accessible by searching the Ticket ID. What I can recommend is to archive a list of the tickets of that specific user so that you will have access to all the Ticket IDs before deletion.
When an agent is suspended their seat is occupied and thus you will still have to pay for it. You will need to downgrade the suspended agent to an enduser to avoid this. More information can be found in Suspending a User.
Is there any reason for this order of operations? They appear irrelevant to me, but maybe I'm missing something. In other words: is the result different if you first suspend, then downgrade?
I'm asking because I want to downgrade an Agent to a Light Agent to not hurt Explore reports, but our contract is currently still waiting to be upgraded to one containing Light Agents. So, I need to wait to downgrade, but I could already suspend.
Hey Sarah,
Thanks for the heads up! I've updated the article and removed the extra "not".
Appreciate you taking the time to share this with us :)
Seems like there's really basic logic missing for this.
We're trying to remove an old Admin following the steps described above, but it means we're not able to transfer all the closed tickets. There are no checkboxes to select and then transfer. Switching to End User without any understanding what that does to the tickets is "scary".
Can Zendesk please guide us clearly on how to assure we're keeping every ticket in our system—even not assigned to a person but searchable? And then how following, how to then Suspend and Delete (I'm not even sure if a Suspended user still charges us monthly? Not clearly stated anywhere I could find.
Thank you
Hey Keisha Cassel
There's not much really. But the main difference is keeping your ticket history. If you delete an agent, all tickets handled by that agent will be deleted as well. While suspending the agent and downgrading them to an end-user will keep the tickets they handled before in your Zendesk instance. Closed tickets remain assigned to the team member when they are downgraded to an end user.
But, don't worry, they won't be able to access them. Once an agent is downgraded to an end-user, they will only be able to access tickets they are assigned to as the requester.
I hope this clarifies it!
The first team member is the team member with the lowest user ID, based on when the agent account was created in Zendesk (the oldest active agent account). It is not based on when they were added to the group, or alphabetically by first or last name.
Hope this clarifies!
Thanks,
Christine
When you access the agent profile, the tickets that appeared on the view are tickets assigned to the agent. Based on the error that you're getting, the agent still has 1 requested ticket.
You can navigate to the user profile > change the ticket view to "requested tickets" then close the ticket so you can proceed in deleting the profile.
Gabriel Manlapig That is interesting as that is not what is happening in our instance. And it looks like others were told the same thing: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/it/community/posts/4643919250586-Allow-Admin-to-Select-Behavior-of-Solved-Tickets-When-Offboarding-an-Agent
In the instruction there is remark about reauthorizing apps. Is that menu path mentioned still correct? If yes what could be the reason I'm not seeing that option on an user profile that has installed apps.
The line I refer to is this one:
"Note: To see authorized apps for a user, click User profile > Security settings > Third-Party Applications."
Hey Daniël,
Suspending the user is just part of the safety procedure to make sure the agent (former) will not be able to access any data within the Zendesk instance.
In your case, it seems the agent will still require access to your account so you may opt to not suspend the agent as he/she will be downgraded to a Light agent role.
Suspending the user will only restrict the access of the agent but will not make any impact to the reporting. The best choice is to wait for the new plan to be implemented and then downgrade the agent's role.
Hi Heather,
We don't have any triggers to reassign, it has to be an imbedded system behavior. I was hoping to know the logic behind it so that I could dictate who the recipient is, but I guess I'll need to manually move all the tickets that are not closed.
I am looking for documentation regarding the behavior when you offboard an Agent but DO NOT reassign the tickets. Where do they go? From a support ticket we were told that the tickets are reassigned to the oldest member of that group but I am not seeing that referenced in any documentation unless I have missed it somewhere.
Unfortunately, there is no option yet to automatically downgrade suspended users. You will need to downgrade them from your Zendesk account to let go of the agent seats.
If it's an old ticket are you able to just delete it using these steps? Deleting tickets
Let me know if that's not what you're looking for.
Hi,
can you help me how to remove|unassign a old stuck ticket from an agent why because it is effecting agent capacity.
regards,
veenila.
Is there a way to automatically downgrade suspended users? We use Azure AD provisioning (SCIM) and after removal, users remain as agents, occupying seats.
A user cannot be deleted if they are still listed as the requester of any un-closed tickets. If you try to, you'll get an error indicating that, User is requester on [x number of] tickets that are not closed.
For reference, please see this article: What happens to the tickets of a deleted user? I hope this answers your question.
I have an agent I need to remove. I understand how to handle assigned tickets with removal, but he doesn't have any assigned tickets, only requested ones, that are all different statuses. What happens if I just delete him? Will his requested tickets be deleted, or will they just have a blank requester, or will his name still appear?
Hi Denise,
Thank you for reaching out! If you downgrade a user from Support, it won't affect the seat in Sell. They are different products so you do not need to worry about affecting the others :)
I hope this clarifies!
Why can't I (as an admin) downgrade a user in my org to an end user?
Gabriel Manlapig Thanks for providing that documentation! I do think that should be listed somewhere in this article as it does come into play for offboarding
I also want to clarify, does that mean the first member mean first Agent in the instance or the first member that was assigned to that group? How can we tell who is first?
Kimberly Bowcutt
That sounds like you might have a trigger or add on that's assigning tickets? The only thing I can think of is that since you mention you assign the open ones, you might be skipping solved ones. You'll want to assign all tickets that are not in Closed (uneditable) status and that includes solved....
Look at the events history on tickets that are getting assigned to other people that you didn't touch. The triggers should tell you more.
What are the consequences of deleting an agent vs suspending them first?
If you downgrade person in Support to end user, what happens to their seat in Sell? This user subscribed to Sell first. When we started implementing Support, she was automatically given a Support seat even though she doesn't need one.
So Zendesk's solution to agent's leaving, and preserving valuable historical information, is to create MORE work by creating additional dashboards and reports? Downgrading an admin also seems to create way too much work to understand what other apps/integrations and macros may break. This process seems entirely confusing and unintuitive me to support a common practice such as agent turnover.
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