Downgrading and removing an agent

What's my plan?

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

Follow these steps when removing an agent from your team:

• Reassign an agent's tickets
• Downgrade an agent's role
• Suspend an agent's account

Related articles:

• Reassigning tickets troubleshooting advice

Reassign an agent's tickets

It's recommended that an agent's tickets be reassigned before they leave your team. Ideally, the agent will reassign their tickets before leaving. If they can't, then an admin should reassign their tickets before removing them from the account.

Only open tickets – that is, tickets that aren't in the closed state – can be reassigned. The agent being removed remains the assignee of closed tickets.

If open tickets aren't reassigned before the agent is removed, then the tickets are reassigned to the admin removing the agent. If the admin removing the agent isn't a member of the group to which a ticket is assigned, then the ticket is reassigned to the first agent in the group.

Note: The first agent is the agent with the lowest user ID, based on when the agent account was created in Zendesk (the oldest active agent account). It isn't based on when they were added to the group, or alphabetically by first or last name.

If you have Auto-assign tickets upon solve activated in your account, any of the agent's solved tickets are assigned to the admin removing the agent. Additionally, if an admin has turned on solved ticket reassignment, a departing agent's solved tickets may be automatically reassigned based on the options selected. See Setting reassignment options for groups' solved 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. Click Manage in Support.
4. On the Tickets tab in the Assigned tickets view, do one of the following:

   • Manually reassign tickets one-by-one by opening each ticket, then selecting the agent you want to reassign the ticket to in the Assignee field.

   • Bulk assign tickets by selecting the tickets' check boxes, then click Edit(number) ticket(s).

     Select the agent you want to reassign the tickets to in the Assignee field.

5. Click Submit.

Downgrade an agent's role

Downgrade an agent's role before removing them from your account so that you can maintain information about tickets they handled.

Keep in mind the following before downgrading an agent:

• It's recommended to check your Explore reports and Support dashboard, as well as export agent-specific CSAT scores , and review the agent's scheduled dashboard deliveries. CSAT data isn't retained and scheduled dashboard deliveries are removed.
• Any articles posted by the agent will continue to have an agent's name instead of a deleted user as its author.
• Aliases aren't preserved when users are downgraded; instead, their alias are replaced with their profile name.
• Agents' personal views and macros are deleted when agents are downgraded.
• If you're 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.

To downgrade an agent's role

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

Suspend an agent's account

It's recommended that you suspend an agent's account as the final step. This prevents the agent from signing in to their account as an agent going forward. You can suspend an agent's account right after they're downgraded. After you downgrade and suspend an 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.