My agent cannot sign in: what to check

Start with one question: is it this person or everybody? That splits the causes in two and saves most of the work.

Start with one question: is it this person or everybody? That splits the causes in two and saves most of the work.

Symptoms: what are they seeing?

• The password is rejected, and resetting it changes nothing.
• They are asked for a code they cannot produce.
• They get in as a customer but land in the help centre rather than the agent interface.
• After several attempts, they are locked out entirely.

That last one has a rule behind it: five sign-in attempts within ten minutes and they are locked out. Somebody guessing repeatedly makes their own situation worse, so it is worth telling them to stop before you start looking.

First question: this person or everybody?

If several people cannot sign in at once, stop looking at the person. That is single sign-on, a certificate, or an outage, and it needs a different investigation.

Everything below assumes it is one person.

The account is suspended

A suspended agent gets no useful message. Suspension can be applied by hand or reached automatically, and it presents exactly like a wrong password.

Check the user's record before anything else. It costs ten seconds and it is a surprisingly common answer.

They are signing in with a different address

Somebody with two addresses signs in with the one that is an end user rather than the one that is the agent. They get in, so it does not feel like a failure, and they land in the help centre with no idea why the agent interface is missing.

Ask which address they typed rather than which address they have.

Two-factor: the codes are the whole story

Where two-factor is on and they have lost the device, the recovery codes are the way back in.

1. Have them search their email for the recovery codes sent when it was set up.
2. If they cannot find any, a Zendesk admin or the account owner can produce one: Admin Center, People > Team > Team members, the person's name, the Account tab, Show recovery code. Share it securely and have them enter it in the Passcode field.
3. If nobody in the account can do that, raise it with pluscloud support.

Team members cannot produce a code for themselves, so this is always somebody else's action. Make sure more than one person holds an admin role, or a single unavailable colleague becomes the reason nobody can get back in.

What to check, in order

1. Is it one person or several?
2. Is the account suspended?
3. Which address did they type?
4. Is two-factor involved, and do they have their codes?

Working in that order means you find the ten-second answers before spending an hour on the ten-minute ones.

See also

• Error: this email is already taken
• Can I sign in with a secondary email address