Light Agents in Zendesk for Cost-Effective Collaboration

If you’re wondering how to involve more of your team in your Zendesk ticket processes without increasing your costs, consider using light agents. These agents can help you expand your support network while keeping your expenses under control. In this blog, we’ll explore how light agents can benefit your business and provide some tips for using them effectively. So, if you’re ready to learn more about cost-effective collaboration in Zendesk, read on.

Why You Should Consider Using Light Agents

Although light agents in Zendesk have limited permissions, they allow you to get more of your team to contribute to your customer experience without breaking the bank on your paid Zendesk licenses. In fact, light agents do not impact your Zendesk costs whatsoever.

Light agents allow non-licensed users the ability to provide your internal team with subject matter expertise, input, and guidance using private comments on your tickets.

Light Agents – What They Are & What They Can Do

Light Agent is a role in Zendesk that was released in Zendesk’s Collaboration feature set. Light agents are Zendesk users that do not occupy a paid seat (license) within your instance. These agents do not need full agent capabilities in handling tickets (specifically in directly servicing customers) but enhance the agent experience and customer experience by being able to contribute to the ticket in an internal capacity.

Unlike agents (who can view tickets and communicate on tickets via both public and private comments), light agents can view tickets but only communicate on tickets via private comments. For a complete catalog of permissions, refer to Zendesk’s Understanding what light agents can do documentation.

Sample Use Cases

Common use cases that Faye sees where light agents are effectively employed are as follows:

1. IT or Engineering – This works well for customer support teams for technical products and services where agents can manage all communications with the customer but may need to rely on internal technical resources for guidance and input. Rather than forwarding email threads or copying and pasting contents of the ticket outside of Zendesk, the light agent feature provides all members of the team with visibility to the ticket and the ability to collaborate on a solution or the response from directly within Zendesk.
2. Sales – Especially for CX and service delivery teams that organically contribute to account management practices such as upselling and cross-selling, providing the Sales team with direct visibility to the customer conversation can further enable revenue-generating activities by reducing friction in the collaboration process.
3. Specialized Knowledge Areas – Similar to #1 above, this use case addresses the need to loop in subject matter experts into your customer experience without fully integrating them into your workflow and budget!
4. Senior Management – The reality is that leadership often wants to have the option to access their teams’ tools, but they are not frequent enough users to justify the licensing cost. In this scenario, leadership can have limited access to the tool to check in on the day-to-day and get in the weeds, as needed. Additionally, light agents can view Zendesk Explore dashboards that are shared with them (applicable to Explore Professional and Explore Enterprise plans only) – this can be a useful way of exposing reporting and metrics to the leadership team without having an impact on seat count.

If your team has a comparable use case but doesn’t feel like the light agent feature is the right fit, you can also consider exploring Zendesk’s marketplace of apps for a pre-built integration between Zendesk and one or more of your existing collaboration tools, such as Slack, JIRA, or Monday.com!

Zendesk Plan Restrictions

As published by Zendesk, the light agent feature has the following plan restrictions:
• Zendesk Suite Growth plans include up to 50 light agents.
• Zendesk Suite Professional plans include up to 100 light agents.
• Zendesk Suite Enterprise plans include up to 1,000 light agents.
• Zendesk Suite Enterprise Plus plans include up to 5,000 light agents.

Please note: The light agent feature is not currently available for the Zendesk Suite Team plan and the above restrictions do not apply to legacy plans or add-ons.

Other Considerations

Before you log in to your Zendesk instance and start setting up every member of your team with a light agent license, consider the fact that there will be maintenance overhead involved with adding and removing light agent users as your team evolves. Be sure to maintain the cleanliness and integrity of your Zendesk instance by designing and implementing your light agent strategy with that consideration in mind.

Conclusion

Leveraging light agents in Zendesk may be the key to pushing your team’s collaboration over the edge without having any effect on your licensing costs!

Looking for expertise in building a thoughtful strategy around how to employ the light agent feature within your Zendesk instance? Contact our certified experts for a consultation today!