Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Support Team or higher |
| Access | Admin |
The roles that come with Zendesk and what each allows. The role says what somebody can do; ticket access says which tickets they can do it to.
The standard roles
| Agent | Views and updates tickets, uses macros and views, sees what their access allows. On Team, Growth and Professional. |
| Admin | Everything an agent does, plus every Support setting except billing. |
| Light agent | Can be CC'd, reads tickets and adds private comments within their own groups. Cannot be assigned a ticket, cannot edit one, and cannot create or edit a report. Suite Growth and above, or as an add-on below that. |
| Contributor | Views and adds private comments to tickets in their groups. Not a role your plan offers: it arrives with an older Chat migration, so treat it as an inheritance rather than a choice. |
In Admin Center, under People > Team > Roles, only these are listed as System. Anything you built yourself sits beside them as Custom.
Enterprise has no standard agent role
On Enterprise and Enterprise Plus the standard agent role does not exist. Everybody who answers tickets gets a custom role instead, and Zendesk ships three to start from rather than leaving you with a blank page.
- Staff solves tickets: edits within their groups, views reports, keeps personal views and macros.
- Advisor configures rather than solves: shared automations, macros, triggers, views, service level agreements, channels. An advisor cannot solve tickets at all.
- Team Lead reads and edits every ticket, and creates and edits end users, groups and organisations.
Role is not the same as access
The role says what somebody can do; ticket access says which tickets they can do it to. Two agents on the same role can see entirely different amounts of the account.
Confusing the two produces access that is not what you intended.
The standard roles cover most teams
Agent for people who answer, admin for two or three, light agent for colleagues who need to see. That covers the majority of organisations without any custom work.
When you need more
- Team leads who should manage views and macros without full admin, if Team Lead above is not close enough.
- Agents who must not delete tickets or export data.
- A group who may use one channel and not another.
Those need custom roles: Enterprise or Enterprise Plus on Suite, Enterprise on Support.
Do not solve it with admin
Granting admin because somebody needs one extra permission gives them every permission. It is the shortcut that turns three admins into eleven over two years.
Review who holds which
Quarterly. It costs nothing to reduce a role, and access that outlives its reason is what every review finds.
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