Administrators and above can add, edit, remove, or replace agents. Go to Admin > Team > Agents to manage your team.


As agents move in and out of your organization, you may need to free up agent licenses in your Freshdesk plan. While doing so, it is vital to keep the outgoing agent's contributions in your Freshdesk. This is particularly handy during business and company audits.


Freshdesk offers two options for freeing up agent licenses:

  1. Deactivate Agent—remove the agent from your system while retaining their tickets, articles, and other contributions.
  2. Delete Agent—remove the agent from your system and wipe their assignment from tickets, articles, and other contributions.


This article contains:

Warning: 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

  1. As an admin, go to Admin > Team > Agents.
  2. Click the More icon against an agent and select Deactivate from the dropdown.
  3. 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?

CategoryEffect
AccessThe 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.
TicketsTickets 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.
ConfigurationYou 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:
  • If ‘assign to this agent’ is the only action in the rule, then the rule will not run.
  • If multiple actions exist in the rule, only the ‘Assign to agent’ action will be automatically skipped.
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 ReportingAll 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.
BillingAn agent license is freed up for a new full-time agent. There is no impact on your agent license count.


Replace Agent Seats

Once you free up an agent seat by deactivating them, you can Add or Edit Support Agents to fill those seats.

Delete an Agent

Important: Ensure that you reassign any unresolved tickets before deleting an agent. Otherwise, those tickets will be Unassigned.


  1. Find the agent to remove from your list of agents or use the search box.
  2. Click the More icon on the right side of their row.
  3. Click Delete to remove them completely.
  4. Click Confirm in the confirmation banner that pops up.


The agent is still retained as a contact in your Freshdesk account. If necessary, you can delete their contact from the Contacts page.