What are Roles in Freshdesk?
Roles are a way to control access to features and functionalities within Freshdesk. Roles help restrict what a user (i.e, an agent or a field technician) can see and do within the Freshdesk Support portal. These roles help you categorize your team into different groups, and assign them different privileges and capabilities. Roles are useful for larger teams, where there are different groups of employees that handle or have expertise in different business areas.
By default, Freshdesk provides these roles - Account Administrator, Administrator, Supervisor, Agent, Field Technician, and Customer Service Technician.
What are Custom Roles in Freshdesk?
Freshdesk’s custom agent roles help you to grant varying degrees of control to your agents. This helps to control the types of data and entities a user can access and edit beyond the predefined (or default) roles in Freshdesk. This is meant to cater to organizations that might have various categories of support or field agents apart from those defined by default roles. They may be required to do different sets of tasks and have privileges other than what’s defined in Freshdesk default roles.
For example, a user from the billing team should have the privilege to respond to tickets related to invoice issues, but not to resolve or close the ticket or edit fields related to customer data. In another case, a company might want to create a field service manager role with the same privileges of an agent who can execute all agent related activities including managing contacts and access the scheduling dashboard for service tasks.
Why are custom roles for field technicians required?
There are two default roles for field service management (FSM) - Field Technician and Customer Service Technician. Both these roles can only respond to the service tasks assigned to them or their service group, add notes, and resolve their tasks. Users assigned to these roles cannot view or respond to tickets.
Field Technician: Can view, reply, update and resolve service tasks
Customer Service Technician: Can create, view, reply, update and resolve service tasks and manage contacts.
It is not possible to make changes to default roles.
However, many businesses have a business model that is primarily field operations led rather than contact center led. In other cases, support agents might double up as field technicians. This makes it imperative for field technicians to create a service task on the job or add a child service task on the fly.
Custom roles in Freshdesk Field Service Management
Administrators can create custom roles or modify the access of existing roles in field service management. This is relevant for customers who have an FSM-first use case and limited in-office support.
Sample scenarios:
- Companies might want to create a Field Service Administrator role that has the privileges to create new service tasks and assign field technicians to work on them.
- Companies might want to create a Field Service Dispatcher role who can only view, manage, and assign service tasks to groups/ individuals based on certain parameters like skills, availability, location, inventory, etc. This role can have privileges restricted to service tasks within a business unit or territory (i.e. mapped to a service group).
- There could also be a secondary Field Technician role who might be an assistant to the main field agent assigned to the task. This role might have just read privilege without access to updating fields, capturing customer signatures, tagging locations, etc.
How to create a custom role
- Login to Freshdesk as an Admin. Go to Admin > Team > Roles > New Role, and enter a name and description for this role. Select Agent type as ‘Field technician’.
- Choose the privileges that an agent with this role should have by selecting the appropriate choices under Field service, Reports, Admin, Bots, Customers, Tickets, and General.
- Save the settings you just created for this role. You can now select and apply this role to an agent when you edit or create the agent's profile. For a detailed description on creating custom roles, refer to this article.
The below table summarizes the privileges for various user roles: