Understand Full-time vs Occasional Agents

An “agent” is a FreshDesk user who provides customer support and technical assistance. They answer tickets, pull reports, and monitor accounts.

Agents may be sorted and grouped based on their team, their expertise, the level of support they can provide, or the degree of their role. You may edit agents to fine-tune their access. An important decision is whether an agent is "full-time" or "occasional".

• Full-time agents: These core agents log into the helpdesk daily. They require a user license.
• Occasional agents: These agents log into the helpdesk a few times monthly, such as the CEO or your field staff. They don’t require user licenses; you can add unlimited occasional agents to your FreshDesk account. Instead, these agents consume a Day Pass when they log in.

Warning: The Account Administrator should be able to access the portal at all times. We strongly recommend configuring them as a full-time agent.

About occasional agents and day passes

When an occasional agent logs into the support portal, they consume a Day Pass valid until the end of the day (23:59 hours).

A day pass does not carry over to the next calendar date. The EOD is calculated based on your timezone.
Growth plan: EOD is calculated based on your Helpdesk's time zone.
Pro plan: EOD is calculated based on the agent's time zone.

Day passes are ONLY consumed if an occasional agent logs into the portal. If an occasional agent receives notifications in their mailbox and replies to those updates via email, a day pass isn’t consumed. To set up this workflow:

1. As an admin, navigate to Admin > Workflows > Email Notifications.
2. In the Agent Notifications tab, toggle on "New Ticket Created" and click Edit.
3. In the Notify Agents section, click Add.
4. Select the occasional agents to notify and click Save.

If you have access to FreshDesk API, an occasional agent will need to retrieve their API Key from their Profile settings, after which they don’t need to spend further day passes to use the API.