Preventing account suspension

Suspension is an outage, not a warning. No tickets or email reach the account at all, and phone numbers are gone after three days.

Suspension is an outage rather than a warning state, and it is harsher than the word suggests. No tickets or email reach the account at all, and phone numbers are gone after three days.

What happens

Note the first row of consequences: mail is not queued for you. Messages customers send during a suspension do not arrive, so there is nothing waiting when the account comes back.

The cause is nearly always a payment

An expired card, a changed bank detail, an invoice going to somebody who left. Every part of that is preventable, and it is the cause by a wide margin.

Warnings go to the account owner, so an owner who has left or does not read account email means the warnings arrive and nothing happens. And a term ending with no decision taken produces the same result by a different route.

Getting it back

The account owner updates the payment method, and the system then tries to charge the account again automatically. That restores the account, but not everything with it: Talk, Explore and SSL have to be re-enabled separately. Contact pluscloud support for that, and for the temporary reactivation if you are past day 29.

Phone numbers removed after three days do not come back with the account. If your voice channel matters, that clock is the one to worry about.

On a managed account the trigger is different

If you buy Zendesk through us, the payment that could fail is not yours: the subscription runs through pluscloud, and there is no card of yours in Zendesk to expire. The timeline above still describes what a suspension does, but the way to avoid one is to keep the commercial side with us current rather than to check a payment method you cannot see.

What stays yours is the renewal date and the decision behind it. A term that ends with nobody having decided produces the same outage as a failed card.

The five-minute prevention

Confirm the account owner is a current employee, that billing goes to a shared mailbox rather than to one person, and that the renewal date is in a shared calendar with a reminder a month ahead. Where you hold the payment method yourself, check that it is valid too.

That is the whole of it, and it is worth doing this week rather than after the renewal date has passed unnoticed.

See also

• Managing invoices and payments
• Who the account owner is and what they may do
• Pausing or cancelling an account