Managing custom roles

Keeping roles accurate as the organisation changes. They drift, and nobody notices because nothing breaks.

Keeping roles accurate as the organisation changes. They drift, and nobody notices because nothing breaks.

Review them

1. In Admin Center, click People in the sidebar and select Team > Roles. The list shows each role's type and how many team members hold it.
2. Open a role with the options menu and Edit to read what it allows. Compare roles puts two side by side, which is faster than reading both.
3. Remove roles nobody uses: options menu, Delete. A role with agents on it cannot be deleted, so move them first.
4. Merge roles that have become nearly identical. Clone is how you build the merged one without starting from nothing.

Moving people across is on the role itself: Edit, then Assign role in the actions menu, then pick the team members. An account can hold 197 custom roles, which is not a limit you will meet, and is not an argument for having a hundred.

Roles only ever grow

Somebody needs one more permission, it gets added, and it is never taken away. After two years a role designed to be narrow allows most things, and nobody decided that.

Reading what a role permits, once a year, is the only thing that catches it.

Watch for near-duplicates

Two roles differing by one permission are usually one role plus a historical exception. Merging them removes a decision nobody remembers making.

Changing a role changes everybody on it

Adding a permission grants it to every holder immediately. Check who that is before saving, because the person who asked is rarely the only one affected.

Empty roles

A role with nobody on it is either finished or forgotten. Remove it, so the list stays short enough that people read it when assigning.

Tie the review to reorganisations

A team split or merge is exactly when roles stop matching reality, and exactly when nobody is thinking about Zendesk permissions.

Record what changed

What you altered and why. The audit log shows the change; only a note explains the reasoning, and that is what makes the next review possible.

See also

• Creating custom roles
• Exporting team member data
• Viewing the audit log