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Downgrading and removing an agent



Edited Jan 29, 2025


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47 comments

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.

 

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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

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 :)

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first downgrade and then suspend the agent's account

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.

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Neil

Zendesk Customer Care

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.

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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."

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Hello Angelique,

The path is correct for examining your own app authorizations. Having run checks in our test environment the current UI build does not have a similar path to check the application permissions given by other account profiles.

I am flagging this for review by our documentation team as the data in question in that menu should only relate to applications that link information for the user rather than the account as a whole (allowing users to share data via linked profiles on both applications, for example).

Abraham K. | Customer Advocate

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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. 

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Shayne Traqueña

Zendesk Customer Care

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!

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If you don't reassign the tickets, how does the system determine who they go to? I assign the open ones, but apparently other tickets get randomly assigned to other agents if they aren't reassigned even though they are not open. I need to dictate who that person is. 

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Heather Rommel

Zendesk LuminaryThe Product Manager Whisperer - 2021Community Moderator

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.

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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.

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Why can't I (as an admin) downgrade a user in my org to an end user?

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Hervin

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Tim,
 
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!

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I'm trying to adjust our subscription after downgrading an agent who has since moved on from our company, but I'm getting a warning message that says the most recently added agent will be downgraded automatically. I just want to change our seat count now that our team has gone down by a person.

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Joyce

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Stevon!
 
The "Agent removal" warning message is a default warning for all users when downgrading an agent seat. As long as you are downgrading seats that are not occupied by your active agents, the most recently added agents shouldn't be affected by the change.
 
I hope this clarifies!

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Once you downgrade the agent you are no longer able to suspend them through the Admin > People tab. Instead you need to search their name in the Agent search bar, click into their account and suspend access from the drop down there. 

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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

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Kristian,
 
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.
 
 

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Hi, I'm working on downgrading some of our internal associates from Light Agent to User. They will still be able to access any tickets they opened or were cc'd on, correct? This seems obvious but I'd like to be 100% certain. Thanks

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Hi Andriana,
 
Yes, they'll be able to see any public replies on tickets where they're the Requester, or they were CC'd on (I just tested it myself). Hope that helps!

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Hi Dave, So they will no longer be able to see private comments? Thanks

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That's correct, Andriana – end-users cannot see internal notes on tickets.

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I need to delete an agent but keep getting an error message of "User is requester on 1 ticket that is not closed." 

The agent has no open or pending tickets and I need to delete their access so I can add a new agent. What is the issue?

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Christine

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Caileigh,

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.
 

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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.

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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

Hey Veenila,

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.

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What are the consequences of deleting an agent vs suspending them first? 

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Hiedi Kysther

Zendesk Customer Care

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! 

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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

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Gab Guinto

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Gabriel,

I understand that downgrading a user role could impact reports on historical data that looks at the user role. While there are no definite plans yet to change the way the info on downgraded agents are stored in Explore, there are some workarounds that you can look into. Here's one alternative: How to report on agent updates in Explore (when Agents have been downgraded to End users)? Another option is to create custom attributes – a custom group attribute or calculated attribute that checks for the user email or id. 

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