If you're paying for Zendesk seats and haven't looked at light agents yet, you're probably overspending. I see this all the time: companies put every person who might ever need to see a support ticket on a full paid seat, when half of them could be light agents at zero cost.
What light agents can do
A light agent can view tickets within their groups and leave internal notes (private comments). That's basically it. They can browse the knowledge base, see ticket history, and add context for the agents who are actually working the queue.
What they can't do: reply to customers, get assigned to tickets, handle chats or phone calls, create macros or triggers, or manage automations. They're observers with the ability to whisper, not participants.
Who should be a light agent
Think about everyone on your team who has a full Zendesk seat right now. How many of them actually respond to tickets? In my experience, companies typically have three categories of people on full seats who shouldn't be:
Managers who review tickets but never reply to them. Engineering leads who get looped in for technical context. Product people who monitor support trends. All of these people need to read tickets and maybe leave an internal note saying "this is a known bug, fix is in next sprint." None of them need a $115/month seat to do it.
Then there are the people who were onboarded as full agents during a busy period and never got downgraded when the rush ended. Seasonal hires, temporary contractors, people who moved to a different department. These seats just sit there, billing quietly.
How many light agents you get
| Plan | Light agent limit |
|---|---|
| Suite Team | Not available |
| Suite Growth | 50 |
| Suite Professional | 100 |
| Suite Enterprise | 1,000 |
Most companies I've worked with are nowhere near these limits. A Professional customer with 80 full agents and zero light agents almost certainly has at least 10-15 people who could be moved over.
The gotcha: permissions that silently consume seats
Here's something Zendesk doesn't make obvious. If you give a light agent elevated permissions in certain products (like making them a Knowledge admin in Guide, or giving them Explore access beyond their role), Zendesk can reclassify them as consuming a paid seat. You won't necessarily get a warning about this.
Check your light agents periodically to make sure they haven't been quietly upgraded by a permisson change someone made without thinking about the billing implications.
The math on switching
Say you have 60 full agents on Suite Professional and you identify 12 who should be light agents. That's 12 seats at $115/month you're removing, which works out to $16,560 per year in savings.
The migration is painless. In Admin Center, go to the agent's profile, change their role from Agent to Light Agent. Their ticket access stays within their groups, they keep their internal note history, and your bill goes down next cycle. Takes about 30 seconds per person.
The tricky part is figuring out which agents to convert, because Zendesk doesn't give you a report that says "this person hasn't replied to a customer in 6 months." You either dig through the API yourself or use a tool like LicenseTrim to surface the candidates automatically.
One more thing
If you're on Suite Team, light agents aren't availble to you at all, which is another reason the $55/agent price is a bit misleading. Teams that need internal collabration on tickets either upgrade to Growth or put everyone on full seats. Something to keep in mind when comparing plans.