Disable vs. delete
Essential Support gives you two different ways to take a teammate out of the workspace, and they behave very differently — pick the one that matches what you actually need. Both are done from Settings → Agents, and both need owner or admin access.
- Disable — a reversible pause. Blocks sign-in immediately, but keeps the agent’s record, their assigned tickets, and their place in routing rules exactly as they are. Use this for a leave of absence, a seasonal contractor, or anyone you expect to bring back.
- Delete — permanent. Frees up their email address for reuse, signs them out everywhere immediately, and lets you reassign their open tickets before you confirm. Use this when someone has genuinely left and won’t be coming back.
Disable an agent
- Click the gear icon → Agents, and make sure the Agents sub-tab is selected.
- Find the teammate in the list and click Disable.
This takes effect immediately: a “disabled” tag appears next to their name, any push notifications registered on their devices are dropped, and they can no longer sign in — the sign-in screen won’t recognize their email as belonging to an active agent, so requesting a sign-in link does nothing for them. Their assigned tickets are not reassigned or touched; everything stays exactly as it was, so re-enabling the same person later picks up right where they left off. A disabled agent also stops counting toward your Team plan’s seat usage, so disabling frees a seat.
To bring them back, click Enable on the same row. If your workspace is on the Team plan and you’re already at your seat cap, re-enabling can be blocked by the same seat limit that applies to adding a brand-new agent — add seats in Settings → Billing first (owner), or ask the owner to.
The owner’s row never shows a Disable button — the workspace owner can’t be disabled.
Delete an agent
- Click the gear icon → Agents, and make sure the Agents sub-tab is selected.
- Find the teammate in the list and click Delete.
- Essential Support asks you to confirm, and shows “Their handle stays on past messages.” — deleting someone never rewrites the history of tickets they already replied to.
- If the teammate has tickets currently assigned to them, a dropdown labelled “Reassign their [count] tickets to” appears. Choose another active agent to hand those tickets to, or leave it set to Leave unassigned. If they have no assigned tickets, you’ll see “They have no assigned tickets.” instead, and there’s nothing to choose.
- Click Delete agent to confirm, or Cancel to back out without deleting anything.
What deleting actually does
- Every ticket assigned to them moves to the agent you chose (or becomes unassigned) right away, before the dialog closes.
- They’re removed from every ticket-routing rule (Settings → Agents → Routing) they were part of. If they were the only agent checked for a given ticket type, that routing rule is dropped entirely — new tickets of that type go unassigned until you add another agent to it. See Set up ticket routing.
- Their active sign-in session ends immediately, on every device.
- Their email address is freed — you (or anyone) can add a new agent using that same email afterward.
- Their name and handle stay attached to every message they already sent, so past conversations don’t show gaps.
- The action can’t be undone from the console — there’s no “undelete.” If you’re not certain, use Disable instead.
- The owner’s row never shows a Delete button — the workspace owner can’t be deleted.
A routing gotcha worth knowing
Disabling someone does not automatically scrub them out of your routing rules — only deleting does that immediately. Until an admin or owner opens Settings → Agents → Routing and clicks Save routing again (which drops every disabled agent from the rules on save), a disabled agent can still turn up in the round-robin for any ticket type they were checked for. If someone you’re disabling was part of any routing rule, revisit the Routing tab right afterward and click Save routing — even with no other changes — to clear them out.