When you disable a staff account, you should evaluate specific features in your site to ensure that incidents remain accessible to the enabled staff members. This includes evaluating your views and rules to ensure that incidents get reassigned accordingly.

Determine how Existing Records Should be Assigned

When disabling a staff member, determine how existing records that are assigned to them should be reassigned. This includes evaluating incidents, answers, and sales opportunities.

Specifically, incidents that are assigned to a disabled staff member remain assigned to that staff member if the incident is updated by the end-user. For this reason, you should evaluate the incidents assigned to a staff member that you are disabling and reassign incident to other staff members as appropriate.

For example, consider how unresolved incidents should be reassigned to other staff members prior to disabling the account. Then, search for all unresolved incidents for that staff member and assign them to another staff account or staff group.

In addition, consider reassigning recently-solved incidents  that are assigned to the disabled staff member. If the customer updates an incident that was set to Waiting or Solved, the updated incident is still assigned to the now-disabled staff member. By searching for all recent incidents assigned to the staff member and assigning them to another staff account or group, updated incidents are assigned correctly. That way, if the end-user updates the solved incident, the incident will be assigned to an active staff member.

Otherwise, designate a staff member to check for updated incidents assigned to a disabled staff member. You can create a custom report or view to display updated incidents that are assigned to disabled staff accounts. Similarly, you can create a report subscription or alert to notify a staff member if an incident is updated that is assigned to a disabled staff member.

Another option is to set up a rule to check for incidents with a status of Updated that are assigned to the specific disabled staff members and then use the rule to re-assign the incident to another, active staff member.

Similarly, evaluate answers and sales opportunities as appropriate to determine how to reassign these records to enabled staff members.

Evaluate Console Reports 

When you disable a staff member, and select "Disabled from Assignment/Report Filters", that staff member is no longer listed if the Assigned field is used as a fixed or run-time filter in a view or report. When this menu option is selected in a staff account, that name will no longer be included as a search option if you have filters in place on specific reports or views. When you permanently disable a staff account, that account will no longer appear in a report filter. 

For this reason, when reassigning records to another staff member, search for the assigned records prior to disabling the account.

For example, if a staff account has the "Disabled from assignment/Report Filters" selected, you will not be able to search for only the incidents that are assigned to the disabled staff member since the name is not included in the menu.

Incidents assigned to the disabled staff member still appear in the view output -- as long as the records aren't filtered for another specific staff member. If you include the Assigned or Created by fields as an output column in the view, incidents assigned to the disabled staff member are listed as still belonging to that staff member, even if the staff member has been permanently disabled or disabled from Assignment/Report Filters in their staff account.

Additionally, any report schedules designated to run from the disabled account, will be updated to run from the administrator account instead.

Evaluate Rules

If you use rules to assign records directly to the staff member that you are disabling, you need to edit those rules to either remove that assignment action or edit the action to assign the records to a different staff member.

For example, if you use an incident rule to assign certain incidents to the staff member you are disabling, you will first need to edit the rule so that it assigns those incidents to another staff member or remove the action that assigns the incident to the staff member. Another option would be to disable or delete the rule.

Important! When evaluating and editing your rules, be sure to consider the overall strategy you have in place for handling and routing records. By editing or removing a single rule, you may end up having records meet the criteria for other existing rules in your ruleset. This could lead to records be handled or assigned to agents unexpectedly.

If you try to disable the Reports option (enable the check box in the staff account) when that account is used in a rule, when you click Update, a pop-up window indicates which rules include actions associated with that staff member.

If you get this pop-up when you try to disable a staff member, modify the associated rules to remove the staff member and then edit the staff account again to disable from the views and reports and lock their account. For more information on dependency conflicts, refer to Answer ID 2260: Dependency Conflicts.