Downgrading an agent

Turning an agent into an end user or a light agent. What happens to their work, and what to check first.

Turning an agent into an end user or a light agent. What happens to their work, and what to check first. Light agents and contributors do not take a paid agent seat, so a rising seat count usually means somebody in one of those roles gained a permission that promotes them, such as replying to customers or Knowledge admin.

Downgrade somebody

1. Reassign their open tickets. Afterwards they can reach only the tickets where they are the requester.
2. Rescue anything of theirs you want to keep. Personal views and macros are deleted, so a view the team relies on has to be rebuilt as a shared one first.
3. In Admin Center, click People and select Team > Team members.
4. Find them, open the options menu on their row and choose Manage in Support.
5. On their profile, set User type to End user and confirm with Yes, downgrade this user.

Three more things go quietly: they are removed as a follower on every ticket they were following, their CSAT data is not retained, and any alias is replaced by their profile name. Articles they published keep showing their name.

When this is the right move

• Somebody moving to a team that does not answer tickets.
• A colleague who now only needs to read and comment internally.
• A project account no longer needed as a full agent.

It frees the seat for somebody else while keeping the person and their history in the account.

It does not reduce what you pay

Worth being precise about, because the two are easy to conflate. Zendesk states it plainly: downgrading the agent does not change your agent seat count, and you will be charged for the same number of agents unless you change your subscription.

So downgrading gives you a seat to hand to the next person. It does not shrink the bill on its own. If the seat is genuinely surplus, that is a subscription change, and it goes through pluscloud.

The reverse direction has its own constraint: you need an available agent seat to upgrade somebody. If there is none, the role change fails until a seat frees up or the subscription grows.

Reassign tickets first

An open ticket assigned to somebody who is no longer an agent sits in a queue nobody works. Move them before changing the role, not after.

Their history stays

Past tickets, comments and reporting keep their name. Downgrading is not deletion and nothing is lost.

Light agent is the useful middle

They keep seeing tickets and adding internal notes, without a paid agent seat. For somebody moving to another department who still gets asked questions, that is usually exactly right.

Check what depended on them

Views shared with them, triggers assigning to them, scheduled reports they own. Each will behave differently, and it is easier to find now than when somebody reports it as a fault.

See also

• Removing or replacing a team member
• Light agents: what they can and cannot do
• Checking your agent seat usage