Sometimes, admins might want to free up agent licenses, with agents moving in and out of the system. While removing agents and repurposing licenses makes sense, it is essential to retain all their contributions independently. This particularly comes in handy during business and company audits.
With the Deactivate Agent option, admins can free up an agent license while retaining their contributions. Admins can deactivate any type of agent - occasional, full-time, and collaborators.
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About agent licenses and downgrading your plan
If you create a request to downgrade your plan and reduce the number of agent licenses you pay for, you must ensure you deactivate or delete enough agents before your next billing cycle or your downgrade request might be rejected.
For example, say you pay for 70 agent licenses and place a request to downgrade to 50 licenses. Your plan is scheduled to downgrade on your next billing cycle. Before the day of billing, you must deactivate 20 agents to meet your new limit of 50 licenses. If you don't deactivate or delete agents, you will be charged for all the agents still configured in your Freshdesk account.
Deactivate an agent
- As an admin, go to Admin > Agents.
- Click the More icon against an agent and select Deactivate from the dropdown.
- A pop-up shows information about the agent's access changes. Click 'Yes, deactivate' to confirm.
When an agent is deactivated, they are moved to the Deactivated Agents list. You can use the More dropdown to delete them permanently or reactivate them.
- If you delete an agent, they still exist as a contact on the Contacts page.
- If you reactivate an agent, they will receive an activation email. Any assigned tickets and authored solution articles will continue to be associated with them.
What happens when you deactivate an agent?
| Category | Effect |
| Access | The agent cannot log in to Freshdesk. They'll receive an error message: "You're not allowed to access this page." |
| If the agent is part of multiple accounts in the same organization with the same email address, they can still access accounts in which they haven't been deactivated. | |
| Tickets | Tickets cannot be assigned to the agent after deactivation. |
| All tickets with the SLA timer running, like tickets in the Open or Pending queue assigned to this agent, will go to the unassigned queue. | |
| All Resolved and Closed tickets will remain assigned to this agent until they are reopened. | |
| Configuration | You can still filter by this deactivated agent. |
| You can search the helpdesk globally with this agent’s information. | |
| The agent will be removed from all account-level configurations except Automations and Scenario Automations. You must manually remove the agent from any configured automation rules and scenarios. | |
Automation rules:
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| If you try to reactivate the agent without an available license, they will become an occasional agent instead. | |
| The agent's email address will remain locked and cannot be changed. This can only be edited from the organization account upon reactivating the agent. | |
| Analytics and Reporting | All reporting data with this agent's contribution will remain. |
| All reports created by this agent will be moved to Trash. | |
| All schedules created by this agent will be permanently deleted. | |
| Billing | An agent license is freed up for a new full-time agent. There is no impact on your agent license count. |
Contact support@freshdesk.com for further queries on deactivating agents.