Light agents: what they can and cannot do

Colleagues who can see tickets and comment internally without taking a paid agent seat, and how many you get depends on your plan.

Colleagues who can see tickets and comment internally without taking a paid agent seat. The answer to most access requests, and how many you get depends on your plan.

How many are included

On a standalone Support plan this comes through the Collaboration add-on, which starts at Support Professional: on Support Team there are no light agents to be had at all. The numbers are generous enough that for most organisations the limit is not the constraint; the habit of asking for a full agent seat is.

What they can do

• Make private comments.
• View the tickets assigned to their groups, or all tickets, depending on how you set it.
• Add, access and download attachments.
• Apply macros.
• Work in help centre content and use approved reports, views, apps and ticket tools.

What they cannot

• Be assigned to tickets.
• Change the ticket status, unless they are the requester themselves.
• Create or edit views.
• Use the @mention feature. They can be pulled into a ticket; they cannot pull anybody else in.
• Create, send or be assigned side conversation child tickets.
• Create, edit or delete triggers and automations.

Who they are for

The product manager who wants to see what customers are reporting. The developer answering a technical question. The team lead in another department who is occasionally asked about a case.

All of them need to look and comment. None of them need to reply, and none of them should cost a seat.

Start here when somebody asks for access

"Can you give me access to Zendesk" almost always means "I want to see what is going on". Offer light agent first, and upgrade only if they genuinely need to answer customers.

Below Enterprise, what a light agent may do is set on the Roles page under People > Team in Admin Center. It moved there in September 2026; it used to sit in the agent workspace settings. Of the three roles listed there, only Light Agent can be edited.

One permission does cost a seat

A light agent given Knowledge admin permission requires a Support seat. Check that before you make somebody the knowledge base owner as a favour, because the role change is invisible on the seat count until the bill.

The same applies more widely on a Suite account: a light agent with agent or admin access in Chat, Explore, Guide or Talk takes a seat too. The permission that costs you is not always granted in Support, so look at the whole team member page rather than the Support role alone.

One thing a light agent can do

On any plan above Team, a light agent may add and edit articles and community posts, in the sections and topics where agents already have permission. That is the exception to the rule that writing help centre content needs a Support licence, so check it before you buy seats for people whose only job is documentation.

The trap to avoid

A light agent who is doing agent work: drafting replies for somebody else to send, or handling a queue through a colleague. That is an agent, and pretending otherwise makes the work invisible in reporting.

See also

• Managing light agent seats
• Finding light agents that take up a paid seat
• Agent, admin, light agent, contributor: who is who