Agents

Your company has chosen Freshdesk as the best solution to handle customer support and technical assistances. The one who is going to be handling the various dimensions of the portal is called an "Agent." An agent's functionality depends on the expertise, the level of support the agent is capable of delivering and the degree of the role assigned. Accordingly, an agent can answer tickets, be responsible for the configurations on the portal, pull out reports and monitor the account invoices as well. Basically, an agent who starts on the portal turns out be a hero at the end of the day :) 

Agents are the persons who handle tickets and work with customer problems. An agent's functionality depends on the expertise, the level of support the agent can deliver, and the degree of the role assigned.

You can add as many agents to your FreshDesk account based on your purchased user licenses. 

Note: Admins can add only 10 agents to their accounts on the Free and Trial plan.

Follow the steps below to add an agent to your Freshdesk account.

1. Login to your Freshdesk account as an administrator.

2. Navigate to Admin from the menu. Under Team, click on Agents.

3. Click on the New Agent option in the top bar. 

4. Under the Agent Type field, you can choose the type of agent you wish to add. In this case, consider that you want to add a Support Agent.
   
   
   
   

5. Next, you can select,

   1. a full-time agent for which you have to purchase an agent seat or

   2. an occasional agent for which you must purchase a day pass for temporary log-in purposes.

6. Enter the Agent details as given below,

   1. Specify the email address of the agent under Email (required field)

   2. Once you enter the email address, Freshdesk will check if this is an existing user on your account. 

7. If the email address is unique and not associated with a contact,

   1. Freshdesk allows you to enter the personal details of the agent like Name, Phone number, Mobile number, and Job Title.

   2. Click on the "Upload Photo" option if you choose to add a profile picture for the agent.

   3. If you're on the Garden plan or above, you can set specific Language for agents. The agents will see the support portal in the chosen language.

   4. If you are on the Estate or Forest plans, you can set a specific Time zone (that takes effect on SLA policies) for each agent on your Freshdesk.

   5. Enter the Signature of the agent if required.
      
      

8. If the email address is already associated with a contact,

1. Freshdesk displays a banner "Email has already been taken."

2. Click on View User in the banner to go to the Contact Profile page.     

3. Click on the "Convert to agent" option.

4. Choose whether the agent should be full-time or occasional, and click on Convert to create an agent from the contact profile.

5. Now, navigate to Admin > Team > Agents and click on Edit next to the name of this agent.

6. Enter the Signature of the agent if required.
   
   
   
   

9. Choose the agent's Scope among the three options available.

   1. Global - Agents can view and work on all the tickets in the helpdesk.

   2. Groups - Agents can view and work only on the tickets assigned to the groups the agent is part of.

   3. Restricted - Agents can view and work only on their assigned tickets.

10.  Choose the required Groups to which the agent should belong.

11. Under the Support Channels option, (available in Estate Omnichannel or Forest Omnichanne) you can enable "Phone" and "Chat" options in Freshdesk and create an agent in Freshcaller and Freshchat, respectively. 

12. Select the Role for the agent. You can choose between the default roles of Account Administrator, Administrator, Supervisor, or Agent, or any other custom role created in your Freshdesk account.

13. Click on Create agent.
    
    

Once you successfully create the agent in Freshdesk, they will receive an activation email. The agent can then click on the link in the activation email to log in and set the password for their Freshdesk account.

For a detailed demonstration, please watch the video on Youtube on how to add agents in Freshdesk.

If you have members in your team who would not be accessing your Freshdesk Account on a daily basis, but only a few days in a month, you could add them as Occasional agents to your account. Occasional agents would not take up an agent seat in your account, but would only consume a day pass each time they access your account. For detailed information regarding day passes, please refer to this article.

For creating occasional agents go to Admin --> Teams --> Agents --> New Agent --> Occasional. On that page, you could enter the agent's information and click on "Save" to add the Occasional Agent to your account.

Full-time agents are those in your core support team who will log into your helpdesk every day. Please navigate to Admin -> Team -> Agents -> Click on new agent to add this person to your portal. In the case of occasional, please switch the radio button to this option, 

Occasional agents are those who will only need to log in a few times every month, such as the CEO or your field staff. That way, people from other departments in your business (like sales and marketing) can log in and take care of specific customer queries from time to time, without you having to purchase an additional agent seat for a whole month.
 

You can add an unlimited number of occasional agents to your helpdesk no matter how many full-time agents you have paid for when you picked a plan. 

Each occasional agent will use up a Day Pass for every day that they log into your support portal. For example, if you have one day pass and an agent logs into the helpdesk at 8 in the morning, the day pass will be valid until the end of the day (00.00 hrs).

Some agents may not be completely involved in your helpdesk workflow and they are called occasional agents. An occasional agent is distinguished by the day pass which is a token that allows you to log in to the portal. 

Here are the prices for day passes:

Note: Only an agent with an Account Administrator role can perform this action. 

If your portal has occasional agents who would log in according to the necessity and workflow involved, they would need a day pass. A day pass allows them to be active on the portal for one business day which is calculated based on the agent's time zone 00:00 - 23:59 hours.

Here are the prices for day passes:

Day passes can be bought from under Admin > Account > Day Passes. This option would only be visible to agents who are Account Administrators.

Occasional agents are required on the portal to follow a certain process or be notified of a few issues. These updates or email notifications would come into their mailbox once they are looped into the ticket thread or assigned on a ticket as an agent or part of the group the ticket is in and so they have no need to login to the portal. There are no charges as such for this workflow. The cost of a day pass is involved only when the agent has the necessity to login to the portal to check or analyze functionalities within the helpdesk environment. 

An agent role would change as time progresses while working on your Helpdesk. You sometimes would have the necessity to change a concerned agent from full time to occasional agent because this agent's contribution has changed. This also means that you will have an additional seat on the portal to add a new agent who would be fully involved in the process. 

In order to make this change, Please go to Admin -> Team -> Agents and click on edit next to this concerned agent who needs to be switched to occasional. Kindly choose the radio button on top of the profile to "occasional" to do the same. Once this is done, please see that this agent is listed under the tab called Occasional.  

The API key for an agent - full time or occasional is available in the profile settings which can be accessed by clicking on the profile icon that gives you a dropdown containing the settings. Please click on it to be taken to the agent profile and access the API key. However, this is not possible without logging in as you need to navigate to this page for which an occasional agent needs to acquire a day pass and login to the portal. 

The Admin tab contains Account Configuration options for your Freshdesk Account. This tab would be visible only to Agents associated with Admin Role and above, and would not be available for Agents and Supervisors.

As an Organization Administrator, you can change other agents’ names by following the steps below,

1. Navigate to the bottom left corner of your Freshdesk account and click on the Switcher icon.

2. Select the option “Users” under the Freshworks Neo Center URL.

3. Select the user whose name needs to be modified and click on “Edit Profile.”

4. Make the necessary changes and click on Save. This will be reflected in Freshdesk as well.
   
   

As an agent, you can change your name by following the steps below,  

1. Navigate to the top right corner of your Freshdesk account and click on the Profile Picture icon, and select the Profile Settings option.

2. On the Profile Settings page, click on the “Change your profile information or password” in the left side panel.

3. This will redirect you to your Freshworks Profile Page. Click on the “Edit Profile” option in the top right corner.

4. Update your name and click Save. The changes will be updated in Freshdesk as well.

   
   

   
   

As an administrator, you cannot change an existing agent’s name.

If you have any further questions or clarifications, please drop an email to support@freshdesk.com and our Product Specialist will be happy to assist you.

 If you are getting an error Email has already been taken View User, then click on View User which would redirect you to the contact's profile. This indicates that there is an existing contact with the same email address. 

• If you have an agent seat available, then click on Convert to an agent from the contact's profile.
• If you do not have an agent seat available, and are wanting to replace the email address of an already existing agent, then please follow the below steps:
  • Click on edit add a secondary dummy email address to the contact such as 'a@a.com'.
  • Make the dummy email address the default email address of the contact. 
  • Remove the original email address.
  • Save the changes. 
  • Once done, you would be able to change the email address under Admin > Agents as well. 

If you are not able to view a ticket and if it throws an error that says The ticket is either not there or you don't have permission then the cause can be either of the below:

1) That particular ticket would have gotten permanently deleted from the Helpdesk.

2) The ticket you are trying to view must be out of your scope, that is, you must have a Restricted ticket access. You could contact your Account Admin to know what scope you are assigned to. To know more about roles and scope refer to this link.

You can make use of Roles to restrict the actions performed by the Agents. You can check out the link to know more about this. 

As an admin, if you want to have a common signature for all ticket replies, click on Admin > Workflows > Email notifications > Templates > Agent reply template > edit and set up a signature.

If you want to have a specific signature for each agent, then click on Admin > Team > Agents > Edit and then set a specific signature.

The agents can also set their own signature by clicking on the profile picture at the top right corner and then choosing 'Profile Settings'.

Go to Admin > Team > Groups > Edit > Group properties > Check the option 'Allow agents to change their availability for automatic ticket assignment'. 

Note: If the Auto assignment has been enabled in multiple groups and even if in one of the groups the above-mentioned option is not checked, the agent will not have permission to change the availability.

In the Free plan you can add up to 10 agents. In the old Sprout plan you can add any number of users. There is no limit on the number of users that can be added.