Understanding and checking agent seat usage

Team, Professional, or Enterprise









When you purchase Zendesk Suite or Support, you purchase a number of agent
seats, or allocated user licenses, that are consumed by the team members you
add to your account. Most roles consume one of the purchased and counted seats, but
there are a few exceptions. If you’re having trouble adding or managing agents, you may
have reached your seat limit.
This article explains how these seats are counted and used.
About roles and seat
provisioning
Checking how many seats you’re
using
Fixing an over-provisioned
account




About roles and seat counts



Support has a variety of user roles, most of which are counted
against the available agent seats and others that aren’t counted. For
example, the Contributor and Light Agent roles in Support don’t consume a
seat.
However, the roles counted against the seat count change when the
account has other Zendesk functionality like live chat and messaging or
analytics and users are assigned roles for both Support and other functionality.

Most roles on other products require a Support seat that is counted
against the available agent seats.
If a user fills a role for another product that requires a counted
Support seat, that user is counted against the Support seat count even
if their Support role typically wouldn’t be counted.



For information about other product roles and requirements, see About team member product roles and
access.


Zendesk roles included in the Support seat count










Products
Role
Requires counted Support Seat




Support
Account owner
Yes


Admin
Yes


Agent
Yes


Contributor
No


Light agent
No


Guide
Admin
Yes


Agent
Yes


Viewer
No


Talk
Admin
Yes


Agent
Yes


Team lead
Yes


Chat
Admin
Yes


Agent
Yes


Custom role
Yes


Explore
Admin
Yes


Editor
Yes


Viewer
No








Checking how many seats you're using

As part of managing your subscription, you can use the Team members page to monitor
the number of agent seats (paid licenses) you have remaining in your account. This
count provides you with advance warning when you're about to run out of licenses and
need to buy more.

Note: You might also want to generate an export of all your team members' data from the
Team members page. This export includes information about your team members,
including their assigned product roles. See Exporting team-member data.
To monitor remaining seats


In Admin Center, click
People in the sidebar, then select Team > Team members. The Team members page appears with a list of all agents, admins, and
the account owner in your account. See About the team members
page.

Review the Seats remaining description on the upper right of the
page. Seats remaining displays information about how many of
your agent seats you’ve used for each product and how many seats you have
remaining. It includes a link to add additional seats.





Seats remaining, Zendesk Suite
Seats remaining, multiple products










To add more seats, click Add more seats to open the Subscription page in
your account. Self-service and eligible sales-assisted accounts can add more
seats from the Subscription page. You must be the account owner or a billing admin to add the seats.
Admins who don’t have billing permission can request subscription
changes.
For details, see Adding agent seats to your
subscription and Managing agent seats.



Tip: If you find you're using more seats than expected, check the roles you
have set for light agents and contributors. See Discovering light agents and contributors that also take up
paid agent seats.



Fixing an over-provisioned account

Due to an issue in the way agent seats were counted for Zendesk Support
Suite and Zendesk Support accounts with multiple products, it was briefly possible
for some accounts to add more team members than they purchased. This inconsistency
with the seat count was fixed with the release of the team member profile in Admin
Center.
Because it was our error, we aren’t taking those additional users away
automatically. Instead, we’ve updated the seats used value in Support to
reflect the actual number of team members you’ve added.
However, you won’t be able to add new users or manage existing roles and
permissions in the team member profile until you reduce the number of team members
on your account to the number of seats purchased. To do this, you must either downgrade permissions or remove the role that requires a Support
seat. Alternatively, you can purchase additional seats for the team members. After
you bring your account back into alignment with the number of agent seats purchased,
your ability to add and manage users and roles will be re-enabled.