Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Doing this on the day somebody leaves is the single highest-value security habit you have. An active account belonging to somebody who has left is the most likely route to a real incident, and it is entirely avoidable.
Reassign their tickets first
Zendesk requires it before you can remove them, and it is the right order anyway. Open tickets assigned to somebody who has gone sit in a queue nobody works: customers wait, and nothing flags it because the tickets look assigned.
Remove their agent access
- Go to Admin Center > People > Team > Team members and select the person.
- Click Manage in Support, or go to their user profile.
- Change their User type to End user.
- Confirm with Yes, downgrade this user.
- Modify any triggers and automations that assigned tickets to them.
That last step is the one checklists forget. A trigger that routes a queue to a named person keeps firing after that person is downgraded, and the tickets it touches go somewhere nobody is watching.
The rest of the checklist
- Check what they own: account ownership, scheduled dashboards, integration credentials in their name, articles they authored. Each keeps working until it does not, and then nobody knows how it was set up.
- Check for a second email address on the record. That is exactly how an account keeps working after the obvious address is disabled.
- Export their satisfaction scores first if you want to keep them. Downgrading does not retain an agent's CSAT data, and it is the kind of thing somebody asks for at the next review, months after the account is gone.
- Reassign their help centre articles.
- Free the seat if you need it.
Account ownership deserves its own line: sort it out while their account still exists, because afterwards there is nobody to transfer it from.
Removing a seat is not the same as paying for fewer
Zendesk is explicit: removing a team member does not change your agent seat count, and you are charged for the same number until you change the subscription. The seat becomes available for the next person immediately; the billing does not follow by itself.
What we would add
Downgrading removes their agent privileges but does not stop them signing in as an end user. For somebody who has left the company, suspend the account as well. Suspending ends access and keeps their name on past tickets and comments. Deleting keeps the tickets but replaces their name in system fields with Permanently Deleted User, so a year of somebody's work stops being attributable to anyone. Deletion also runs in two stages: the user is soft deleted and stays in the Zendesk database for 30 days before being removed permanently and automatically.
And keep this as a written checklist alongside your other leaver steps. Held in somebody's head, at least two of these get skipped.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.