Terminated Employees - How to deal with the user in Zendesk? | Community
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Terminated Employees - How to deal with the user in Zendesk?

  • April 30, 2021
  • 3 replies
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Hutton,

I am really looking for best practices or guidance here.  We are an internal help desk and I manually upload end users via CSV each week (or so).  End User John Smith (jsmith@company.com) has a user profile and some tickets.  If John is terminated, what to do with his profile?  In 6 months, I may have a Jim Smith (email also jsmith@company.com) start working here and I don't want Jim to assume John's old profile and ticket history.  I don't want to lose John's history either.

What I have been doing in my upload is adding the tag "termed" to each user as well as adding an email (empid#@company.com) so that it is unique to them.  Then in zendesk, manually make the empID email primary and remove the jsmith email.  It is tedious and I also have no way of knowing how many termed users I have done this with and who is left to do.  I am looking for a more automated way.  

I played around with the API update_many and it just adds the empID email along side of the jsmith email and the user ends up with 2 emails.  The upload does the same thing.  I cannot seem to replace the primary email with a new one in one go.

 

Example used in the update_many:

{"users": [ {"external_id": "12345", "email": "12345@company.com","verified": "true", "primay": "true"}]}
 
I think in the end what I would like is to have John be suspended and only have the empid@company.com email left on his profile.  If John ever starts working here again, I may have to act manually.  I have a trigger to notify me of tickets created with the termed tag.
 

    3 replies

    Heather13
    • Heather13
    • May 4, 2021

    Hi Spencer Hutton,

    I guess my first question is, what problem are you trying to solve? Usually when resources leave, I just manually reassign all their non-closed tickets to a group or their manager for redistribution, then downgrade the person to End User. That's it. This way the history is kept intact :D

    Sincerely,

    Heather

    Hutton,
    • Hutton,
    • Author
    • May 4, 2021

    Hi Heather.  I am not referring to agents here, but end users; I will revise my original comment so it is clearer.  Being internal, we might reuse their email address down the road.  i.e. Jim Smith now works here, but John Smith used to years ago and now Jim uses the email address that John once used.  I am trying to make sure Jim starts with a clean ticket history and not John's history because they use the same email address (but at different times).  

    What should happen to end user John when he leaves the company and will not be submitting any more tickets?  To complicate it (I've been known to do that), what happens if John starts working here again and Jim is still here.  We would give John the email josmith@company.com and would still want him to retain his ticket history (maybe?).  

    I thought about giving everyone 12345@company.com where the numbers represent their employee ID (external ID in ZD) because that will always be unique to them.

    Heather13
    • Heather13
    • May 5, 2021

    Hi Spencer,

    Ah, Ok - I see...

    I think I would stick with suspending access and I like your process of adding the "termed" tag. If you get someone onboarded that uses the same email as a previous person, I would suggest attending to that situation manually when it happens. I suspect it might not happen that often and I can't think of an automated way to get this to work the way you want it.

    I look forward to anyone else's contribution on this thread in case I'm wrong (it happens LOL)!

    Sincerely,
    Heather

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