Deactivating or deleting a brand

Retiring a brand is mostly about what happens to its tickets, its addresses and its help centre. Deactivating is almost always the right move.

Retiring a brand is mostly about what happens to its tickets, its addresses and its help centre. You deactivate it in Admin Center > Account > Brand management > Brands.

Deactivate a brand

1. In Admin Center, click Account in the sidebar, then select Brand management > Brands.
2. Click the menu icon beside the brand and select Deactivate.

The brand moves to the bottom of the list. Deleting is the same two clicks with Delete instead, so the menu makes an irreversible action look like a reversible one.

Mail keeps working when you deactivate

This is the reassuring part and it is easy to miss. A customer who writes to the retired brand's support address after deactivation still gets a ticket: it is created for your default brand instead. Nothing bounces and nothing is lost.

After deletion it is the opposite. Mail to that brand's addresses ending in zendesk.com is rejected, so tell customers before you delete rather than after.

Deleting quietly rewrites your open tickets

Any ticket for that brand that is not closed is automatically updated to your default brand. That is not just a reporting change: those tickets may now match different rules and views, and a customer looking at them sees a different brand than the one they wrote to.

Closed tickets keep showing the deleted brand, so your history splits: everything closed keeps the old name, everything still open has silently moved. Deactivating avoids all of this, and there is almost never a reason to prefer deleting.

Before you deactivate

• Its help centre articles. Move what is worth keeping to another brand's help centre before end users lose access. Agents can still reach it afterwards, which buys you time but is not a plan.
• Redirects, if the help centre had traffic, so search results and links do not land on nothing.
• Your rules. Triggers conditioned on that brand stop matching, which is correct, but rules that assign it as a default need changing.

Tell customers before the site disappears

A help centre going offline without notice is the part people feel. A short banner on the old site for a few weeks, pointing at where things moved, costs nothing and prevents a run of confused tickets.

See also

• Adding and configuring a brand
• Decommissioning a support address
• Can I redirect traffic from deleted articles