Best practices for removing agents

In an ever-changing environment, agents can come and go. And when it's time for them to leave, what's the best way to maintain your support lines of communication? This article describes best practices for maintaining your lines of communication with your customers after an agent leaves your team.

Here are the steps you should take when removing an agent from your team:

Reassign agent tickets
Downgrade the agent role
Suspend agent account
Ticket reassignment

The priority when an agent leaves the team is to ensure that any tickets they were handling are handled by someone else on the team. Ideally, the departing agent will be able to reassign the tickets they assigned to themselves before the end of their time with the company. If the agent cannot do this, the admin will need to reassign the tickets.

First, an admin needs to access the agent's profile from Admin Center > People > Team Members. Then, he must select the Assigned Tickets view. At this point, he has two options for reassigning these tickets.

The first option is to manually assign each of these tickets, one by one, to the agents you would like to take the tickets.

The second option is to bulk assign these tickets to the agents you would like to take the tickets. To do this, select the checkboxes next to the tickets you want to assign and click the Edit (number) Ticket(s) button that will appear in the upper right corner of your screen.

Agent role downgrade

When an agent leaves, you may want to keep information about tickets that the agent has previously handled. So you shouldn't delete an agent when they leave. Instead, first downgrade and then suspend the agent's account. This way, in most cases, the reporting information will remain intact for future reference and any articles published by your agent will continue to have their name, rather than a deleted user, as their author.

Keep in mind that removing the admin who originally set up your integration between their standalone Chat and Support account will result in their access being downgraded and, consequently, ticket creation failing.

Downgrading an agent will permanently erase their personal views and macros. Remember to update any application or integration or API request (Authentication for API requests). Another administrator must reauthorize these applications before you can downgrade the administrator.

Note: Administrators and agents cannot see a list of apps that other users are authorized to use. In their user profiles, agents can see a list of applications they can use under Security Settings > Third-Party Applications. Before removing an agent, ensure that they do not need authorization to use Zendesk in other applications if they remain with your company.

Downgrading an agent's role

In the Admin Center, click the People () icon in the sidebar and select Team > Team Members.
Select an agent and click Edit.
In the agent's profile, you will see the User Type section in the upper left corner.
Select End User as the new user type.

You will see a warning screen informing you that the privileges will be lost if you proceed with the downgrade. Select Yes, downgrade this user to confirm the operation. Once you confirm, your agent will lose their role and will no longer count towards the agent limit.

Note: Just downgrading the agent does not change the count. You will still be billed for the same number of agents until you change your subscription, which can be done by your account owner. In the Admin Center, click the Account () icon in the sidebar and select Billing > Subscription.

Explore users may experience issues with some reports when an agent is downgraded. Potential problems include:

Reports that do analysis by user role may be affected as the downgraded agent is now an end user.
Report tabs with user filtering enabled will no longer display the downgraded agent in the drop-down list.

If your Zendesk plan includes light agents, you may want to downgrade an agent to a light agent and then suspend it, mitigating the impact on your Explore reports.

Agent account suspension

The final step in this process is to suspend the agent's account. This will prevent the agent from being able to connect to their account. This can be done right after the agent is downgraded, within the user's profile. After you downgrade or suspend the agent's account, they will only be able to access tickets they are assigned as a requester.

Note: the Agent profile suspension does not automatically remove the agent if the number of agent licenses is reduced. You need to downgrade the agent first.

In the Admin Center, click the People () icon in the sidebar and select Team > Team Members.

Select an agent and click Edit.
Click the drop-down icon at the top right of the profile and select Suspend access.

Your agent will no longer be part of your Zendesk Support instance.