Suspending and deleting users

Two very different actions, and the difference is larger than it looks. Suspending is reversible; deleting is blocked while the person has an open ticket.

Two very different actions, and the difference is larger than it looks. Suspending is reversible; deleting is blocked while the person has an open ticket.

Suspend somebody

1. In Support, click Customers in the sidebar and click the person's name.
2. Click the user options menu in the top right and select Suspend.
3. Choose the channels you are suspending them from: Messaging or All channels.
4. Choose a reason, add a description if it will help whoever reads this in three months, and click Suspend user.

To undo it, open their profile and click Unsuspend in the upper left, or go to Customers > Suspended users and choose Unsuspend from the options menu.

That third step is newer than most people's habits: suspension is per channel now, so suspending somebody from messaging leaves their email working.

What suspending does

A suspended person can no longer sign in, cannot create tickets, and stops receiving notifications. New requests from their registered identities land in the Suspended tickets view rather than your queue, so nothing is thrown away. They are not told they have been suspended.

Everything about them is kept and it is reversible in a click, which makes it the right answer for spam sources, for somebody being abusive, and for anybody you might need to reinstate.

Delete an end user

1. In Support, go to Customers, find the person and click their name.
2. Click the user options arrow in the upper right and select Delete.
3. Click OK to confirm.

To remove somebody before the thirty days are up, an admin goes to Admin Center > People > Deleted users > Deleted users and picks them from the list. The name appears twice because the page sits inside a section of the same name; that is not a typing mistake.

Deleting is blocked in more cases than it allows

You cannot delete somebody who is the requester on a ticket that is not closed. The attempt fails with an error. The way through is to change the requester on those tickets, or to close them first, and neither is something to do in a hurry.

The same applies to placeholder users created during ticket sharing and to users created through legacy Chat.

And it is not instant

A deleted end user is soft deleted and queued for permanent deletion after 30 days. An admin can force it sooner, which is what a privacy request usually needs. Until that point the record is out of the way rather than gone, and after it the deletion cannot be undone.

Those thirty days matter during an incident: deleting under pressure is recoverable for a month, and forcing it immediately is not.

Who may do it

An agent needs access to all tickets to delete an end user, and the same access to suspend one, because suspending requires the permission to edit user profiles. On Enterprise the ability comes from the agent's custom role. Only admins can delete end users in bulk.

Suspend first, almost always

It solves the immediate problem and leaves the decision to delete for a calmer moment. The reasons to delete are narrow: a verified erasure request, a record created in error with no real history, or a retention policy that says so.

Not "tidying up". There is no cost to keeping users and no benefit to removing them.

Consider redaction instead

For an erasure request, redacting personal data from tickets and removing it from the record often meets the obligation while keeping the operational history, and it does not run into the open-ticket block. Worth checking what is required before you delete anything.

See also

• Can I recover a deleted user or organisation
• Redacting identified personal data
• Handling a data subject request