Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Light agents and contributors do not take a paid seat. What they can do, and the change that quietly turns one into a paid agent.
What a light agent can do
- Read tickets in the groups they belong to.
- Add private comments.
- Apply macros.
- Be the requester of a ticket, and change the status of that one.
- Add, open and download attachments.
- Read your internal help centre.
What they cannot do is the reason they are free: no public replies, no ownership of tickets, no configuration. Two of the limits catch people out in the first week. A light agent cannot use the @mention feature, so they can be pulled into a ticket but cannot pull anybody else in. And they cannot create or edit views, so the list they want to work from has to be made for them.
Who they are for
The specialist who gets asked twice a week. Someone in finance, or engineering, or the warehouse, who needs to see the ticket and answer a question inside it but is not doing support.
Used properly this is one of the better-value things in Zendesk, because it lets you involve the whole company without paying for the whole company.
Contributors
A contributor views tickets in their groups and adds private comments there, which in daily use is close to what a light agent does. The difference is where it comes from: contributor is not a role your plan offers, it arrives with an older Chat migration. If you have contributors you inherited them, and if you do not you cannot go and create one.
The change that costs money
A light agent given the ability to reply to customers is an agent, and is counted as a paid seat. This rarely happens as a decision. It happens as a favour, once, because someone needed to answer a customer directly, and the permission stays.
There is a second route that is easier to miss: a light agent given Knowledge admin permission requires a Support seat. Making somebody the knowledge base owner is a seat decision, whether or not anybody treated it as one.
And a third, on a Suite account: giving a light agent or a contributor a role in another product. This one is not the blanket rule it looks like, and the exceptions can save you a seat you do not need. In Knowledge, the Agent role is free alongside a light agent seat but costs an extra seat alongside a contributor seat, while Viewer is free alongside either. Talk's Admin role and Explore's Viewer role are free alongside either as well. So the permission that costs you is not always granted in Support, and not every permission granted outside it costs.
Zendesk provides a way to find light agents and contributors that are taking up a paid seat, and it is worth running before a renewal rather than being surprised by the number.
Availability and numbers
Light agents come with every Suite plan, and on a standalone Support plan through the Collaboration add-on. What differs is how many are included: Suite Team has them as an add-on only, Growth includes up to 50, Professional up to 100, Enterprise up to 1000 and Enterprise Plus up to 5000.
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