When an agent leaves your team, it's important to maintain your lines of communication with your customers. This article describes steps you should take for downgrading and removing an agent from Zendesk.
This article contains the following sections:
Related articles:
Reassigning an agent's tickets
It's recommended that you reassign an agent's tickets before they leave your team. Ideally, the agent will reassign their own tickets before leaving. If they can't, then an admin should reassign their tickets before removing the agent from the account. You can reassign open tickets only – that is, tickets that aren't in the closed stat. The agent being removed remains the assignee of closed tickets.
If you don't reassign open tickets before removing 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. 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).
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.
To reassign an agent's tickets
- In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Team members.
- Select the agent.
- Click Manage in Support.
- 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.
-
- Click Submit.
Downgrading an agent's role
Downgrade an agent's role to an end user before removing them from your account so that you can maintain information about tickets they handled.
- CSAT data for the agent isn't retained. Review the Support dashboard and consider exporting agent-specific CSAT scores if needed.
- 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, but are replaced with their profile name.
- Agents' personal views and macros are deleted.
- Apps and integrations might fail, if they were set up by an admin you're downgrading. 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.
Before you downgrade an agent, be sure you've reassigned all of their tickets (see Reassigning an agent's tickets).
To downgrade an agent to an end user
- 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.
Suspend an agent's account
After you've reassigned the agent's tickets and downgraded the agent's role, you should suspend the agent's account to prevent the agent from signing in to their account as an agent. You can suspend an agent's account immediately after you've downgraded them. After you downgrade the agent's role and suspend the agent's account, they will only be able to access tickets they are assigned to as the requester.
If the user account of the dashboard owner has been deleted, any unshared dashboards they created cannot be recovered.
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.
47 comments
Marcone Soares Moreira
Is there a way to automatically downgrade suspended users? We use Azure AD provisioning (SCIM) and after removal, users remain as agents, occupying seats.
0
Cheeny Aban
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.
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Jacqueline Ewens
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?
0
Gabriel Manlapig
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.
0
Anne-Flore Caire
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.
1
Daniel Hoffkins
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.
0
Sydney Neubauer
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.
0
Gabriel Manlapig
The following outlines how a user's deletion from a given account affects the tickets they've interacted with:
Tickets assigned to the deleted user (for agents)
The agent will be removed as assignee and the tickets will be reassigned to the agent's group:
For more information, please see this article: What happens to the tickets of a deleted user?
I hope this answers your question. Thank you!
0
Sydney Neubauer
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
0
Gabriel Manlapig
It seems this is the documentation that you're looking for - Removing group members
"If the team member removing the other team member from the group isn't a member of the group, tickets are reassigned to the first team member in the group with an active ID (excluding light agents and agents lacking permissions required to be assigned the tickets)."
I hope that helps!
0
Sydney Neubauer
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?
0
Christine
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
1
Victor Menezes
I'm running into an issue when downgrading a staff agent to end-user their solved ticket history is reassigned. I thought the historical assignments should have been preserved.
0
Alex Zheng
It will depend on whether or not the tickets are solved or closed. If they are closed then the assignee can no longer be changed and thus the historical assignment is preserved as long. If the ticket is just solved then the assignee will get reassigned as the assignee cannot be an end user and it goes through what is described in the article here.
1
Aija
I try to bulk reassign tickets of an agent who left the team..I go to agen't support page, and "bulk" here is 30 tickets. How can I select more, agent has around 1000 tickets which are not yet closed.. I tried to also make a trigger reassigning the solved tickets of this agent, but it has reassigned whopping 23 tickets in 2 days…there has to be faster ways to do these actions?
0
Simone Pace
Hi
I'm pretty sure that tickets were reassigned to the agent's group when demoted. When did this change?
Thank you
0
Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana
Hi Simone Pace ,
The tickets would still be assigned to the demoted agent's group:
0