You can add full-time and occasional agents to your Freshdesk. You can restrict which parts of your Freshdesk each of your agents can see and what actions they can perform. You can also have agents added to your Freshcaller and Freshchat right from Freshdesk.

ARTICLE OVERVIEW

 

A quick guide to adding agents to Freshdesk:

  1. Login to your support portal as an Administrator.
  2. Click on the Admin tab on the left panel > Team > Agents.
  3. You can view a list of all agents in your Freshdesk.
  4. To add a new agent, click the New Agent button in the top fold.

  5. You can choose whether your new agent should be a full-time or an occasional agent using the radio button.
  6. You will get 3 free day passes (as a whole, for an account) for occasional agent access. An occasional agent will use up a day pass every day he/she logs in. So with 3 passes, 3 occasional agents can each log in once or one agent can log in for 3 days. To add more day passes, click on 'Day Passes' under the Admin tab


Now let's try adding a full-time agent (the procedure is the same for occasional agents)
  1. Specify the email address of the agent under Email (required field).
  2. Once you enter the email address, the system will check if this is an existing user on your account. If so, you will be notified of the same. If the email address is new, you will get the option to enter further details - Full name, Work number, Mobile number and Title.
  3. You can add a profile picture for your agent, or it can be added later on by the agent after logging in.
  4. If you want all your agents to use a standard signature, you can use the Signature box to fashion it. You can add pictures, links, and format the text completely, and you can copy the signature and paste in signature box of other agents too




Note: If a new agent is added during a billing cycle, charges will be prorated based on the time when the changes are made.


Ticket scope


The ticket scope determines what tickets agents can see in your Freshdesk. By default, the scope is Global ( agents can see everything in your Freshdesk). You can also choose whether they should only be able to see tickets assigned to them (Restricted access) or see all tickets assigned to the Agent Group that they belong to (Group access)



Roles


A role determines what features an agent has access to in your Freshdesk. For example, an 'Account Administrator' has complete control over your Freshdesk, including your Freshdesk billing, while an 'Agent' can only perform actions on tickets such as replying and resolving. Learn more about roles and how they differ from scope



Support channels

 

Support channels works differently depending on whether you're on an Omnichannel plan or a stand-alone Freshdesk plan



If you're on an Omnichannel Freshdesk plan( Estate Omnichannel or Forest Omnichannel) agent management is centralized to centralized. Onboarding and managing agent access across channels become easier. 

  • You can add or delete agents only from Freshdesk 
  • The role that you choose for the agent on Freshdesk will be carried over to Freshchat and Freshcaller
  • Any update to an agent's role on Freshdesk will immediately be synced to Freshchat and Freshcaller. On the other hand, if you change the role of an agent on Freshchat and Freshcaller, it will not be synced to your Freshdesk. Changes that you make on Freshdesk can override any changes you've made on Freshchat or Freshcaller

If you're on a stand-alone Freshdesk plan ( Sprout to Forest)

  • Enabling "Phone" and "Chat" will have the agent created on Freshcaller and Freshchat respectively
  • The role that you choose on Freshdesk will be mapped to the same role on Freshchat and Freshcaller. 
  • You can also add agents from Freshcaller and Freshchat. 



Associating groups to agents

  • You can add agents to one or more groups when you are adding them to the helpdesk
  • Click on the Associate Groups button to see the list of groups available and choose the groups to associate with your new agent



Language and time-zone options

  • If you're on the Garden plan or above, you can set specific languages for agents. The agents will see the support portal in the language chosen.
  • Additionally, on the Estate and Forest plans, you can set specific time zones (that take effect on their SLA policies) for each agent on your Freshdesk.
  • Click Save after you've entered all the necessary information.



  • The agent receives an activation email through which the agent can log in and set the password.
  • Back on the agent's page, you can click on the Edit button next to each agent and make changes to their information.
  • You can also delete agents by clicking on the Delete button. When an agent gets deleted, they will become a contact in your Freshdesk.
  • Once an agent has been deleted, tickets assigned to that particular agent will be unassigned. 


'Existing Freshworks user' error


Sometimes when you try adding an agent you might receive an error message saying that the user already exists. This could be due to one of two reasons:

  • The email address is already associated with an agent. 
  • The email address is associated with an existing or deleted 'Contact' in your Freshdesk. In this case, you can just convert a contact into an agent by going to the Customers tab in Freshdesk, clicking on the contact name and choosing Convert to an Agent in the resulting screen.



'Converting to an agent will delete all the secondary emails of this contact' message


When you use the 'Convert to an Agent' option for a contact, you would be prompted with a pop-up message: 'Converting to an agent will delete all the secondary emails of this contact. Proceed to convert?': 



An agent can have only one email address associated with their agent profile. This message is to let you know that in case the contact has more than one e-mail address associated, the primary e-mail address will be taken as the agent's email address and the remaining email addresses (secondary email addresses) would be deleted.

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