Limiting Light Agent visibility - need to rework our groups?

@kyle.kowalsky this is a really interesting challenge! As you've probably read, you can't limit the tickets light agents can see without using groups. So that leaves you really with the only solution of using groups per school. That being said, I'd be interested to hear why you're looking to bring light agents into the mix. For example, if you want to give people read only access to tickets, there may be other ways to surface that information (without licensing everyone) that don't require you to change your setup. 

Jumping on what Mark said - you might also consider surfacing data to these light agents by way of Explore Dashboards.  You can give them view only access into the dashboards, and then prefilter the dashboards using hidden bookmarks and filters.  Curious to see if anyone else has any other ideas.

Hi @kyle.kowalsky,

In fact you can limit access due to the limited views, but in case you are an Enterprise user you can create also a new role model in order to limit access in the way you want.

Regards,

Stephan

I hadn't considered Explore dashboards. I think our primary goal is to give users a contact at the school who they can talk to about their ticket (users can check their own tickets themselves, but they don't). I suspect the other features of light agents wouldn't get used often, so I'll dig into Explore Dashboards and see if I can't get something going there.

Stephan we're not on Enterprise so can you expand on what you mean as far as views? Are you talking in Support or is this within Explore? If Support, my understanding was that you need to be in the group for the ticket to see them even in views.

At the moment, I've started making new groups for the individual schools/sites to try to find any problems with this sort of setup, and I suspect I'll keep the departments groups and just rework our triggers. I don't think it'll cause a problem, but I definitely want to check out other options (especially an Explore Dashboard) so I can get more familiar with things.

Hi @kyle.kowalsky, 

We also started on Zendesk Suite Professional and since last year we are customer using Zendesk Enterprise Suite. This license agreement of Zendesk offers you the possibility to create a new business role for agents or light agents (please check). 

Regards, Stephan

just to clarify @stephan12 - it's not currently possible to create a new role for light agents. So if the concern is licensing, you have to use the light agent role even with enterprise (which we use). 

Hi Mark, 

for sure you can not change a standard role but you can create a "clone" with different authorizations. For example to set a "new light agent" role who allows the agent to work with tickets which are assigned to a private group or they will have access to all tickets at all. 

I think you are also interested in getting access to tickets without paying for license per month. This will be a challenge, because the above mentioned scenario will cause additional license fees as well.

Regards, Stephan

@stephan12 right - so cloning the light agent role will not help if the reason for using light agents is to prevent additional licensing costs. 

Right! Sorry, thought this was clear for all. 

My main problem that I'm running into with changing up the groups so that we can properly use light agents is how our department works:

Each school is assigned a field tech - 3 people, each in charge of a set of schools. Each school can have the field tech/agent and a light agent added to the school's group, so school ABC can have Adam the agent and Billy the light agent. Good so far.

The rest of our team is everywhere. For example, our network tech Cam handles all network issues at all schools. Most tickets sent to a school aren't anything Cam has to worry about. But, if Cam isn't in the group, we have to assign the ticket to Cam, and now the light agent can't see it since he's in a different group (separating our department into groups for "network", "server", "admin", and "support" helps us keep things a bit more organized though not sure we can keep it up if we want light agents).

Kinda wish I could assign a ticket to two groups or something but that doesn't quite work.

This does make it sound like you should be using organizations as well as groups. You can add the agents to those organizations so they can only see those tickets. You could then use the groups for types of issues (like networking). This is a more common setup.

I've also seen cases where people are added to multiple groups, so in your example with schools as groups, everyone in the network team would be in every group. It's kind of a pain to manage that way but it's less of a change from what you're doing today. In that case the light agent wouldn't lose visibility to the ticket

Yeah I think I'm gonna try to go with the everyone necessary in every group (if only we could add groups to groups). I did look at Organizations but I'm thinking it's overkill for our setup and probably more hassle than it's worth and would introduce a different set of problems for us.

Though now I've got a new issue. How do I assign a ticket through a Trigger to an Agent through a specific group? Looks like you just get a choice to assign a name, or a group, whereas if I'm looking at a ticket, I choose a group, then choose the person.