Understanding Agents and Admins in Zendesk

Agents

Agents are your support staff, they will use your Zendesk instance the most and are usually the front line for your Zendesk team. The extent of their ability is set by admins defining permissions and privileges. Zendesk agents are at the center of your workflow and admins should always work to set up the instance to best support their agents’ needs.

A few of the main things Zendesk Agents can do:

• Make public and private comments on tickets
• Add and edit end-user profiles
• Create and edit their own macros
• Moderate and manage articles in the Help Center/Guide

Light Agents

Light Agents are a professional and enterprise add on. They have very limited permissions and cannot perform such tasks like commenting publicly on a ticket like regular agents could, but can give insight or ideas to the team through private comments as well as assign tickets to full agents. With the right permissions Light Agents can also see views, utilize macros, view reports, access restricted user guide areas, and user-installed apps.

Administrators

Admins can do all the tasks that an agent might do in Zendesk, however, they also have additional privileges to manage and customize your Zendesk instance.

A few of the main things Zendesk Admins can do:

• Create access and edit business rules
• Create and edit reports
• Install apps
• Create groups and organizations
• Assume another user’s identity

Account Owner

The Account Owner is a type of administrator. The account name is associated with this person’s name and is usually the person who created the account. There can only be one account owner, though account ownership can be moved to another admin by the account owner when needed. The account owner has full access to Zendesk Support, such as invoicing, payment options, and benchmarking for the account.