Best practices for removing agents

When an agent leaves your team, it's important to maintain your lines of communication with your customers. This article describes best pratices for removing agents from your Zendesk account.

Follow these steps when removing an agent from your team:

• Reassign the agent's tickets
• Check Explore reports and dashboards
• Downgrade the agent's role
• Suspend the agent's account

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

1. In Admin Center, click People in the sidebar, then select Team > Team members.
2. Select the agent.
3. In the upper-right, click Manage in Support.

   Alternatively, you can click Go to user profile under the table.

4. 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.
5. Click Submit to update the ticket.

Note: If you aren't able to reassign the agent's tickets, see our reassigning tickets troubleshooting advice.

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.

Note: Downgrading an agent deletes their personal views, personal macros, and agent-specific CSAT scores permanently. You can retain an agent's CSAT scores by Exporting dashboard tabs and reports.

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.

Note: Admins and agents cannot view a list of the apps that other users are authorized to use. Agents can see a list of the apps they are authorized to use from their user profile. Before removing an agent, make sure they are not relying on Zendesk-authorized use in other apps, if they are remaining with your company.

To downgrade an agent's role

Note: Make sure that the agent you're about to downgrade has had all their tickets reassigned. See Reassigning tickets.

1. In Admin Center, click People in the sidebar, then select Team > Team members.
2. From the list, click the agent you want to downgrade.
3. In the upper-right, click Manage in Support.

   Alternatively, you can click Go to user profile under the list.

4. 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.

Note: Downgrading the agent does not change your agent seat count. You will be charged for the same number of agents unless you change your subscription (see Changing plan subscriptions).

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

1. In Support, click the Customers icon () in the sidebar.
2. Locate the agent who was downgraded to an end user and click Edit.
3. Click the drop-down icon at the top-right of the profile and select Suspend access.