Create an agent

Creating a new agent is a simple process. To create an agent, enter the prospective agent’s email address, assign an agent role, and then click a button. That’s pretty much all you have to do.

Before we take a more detailed look at this process, however, we should mention that agents are not required to have user accounts on your web site. When an agent registers with your site he or she registers as an agent only; a regular user account (and a regular user profile) is not created for the new agent. In more concrete terms, that means you’ll see the user listed on the Manage Agents page but not on the Manage Profiles page.

Oh, and agents do not have to have accounts with specific domains or with specific email providers. Any user with a valid email address can be assigned an agent role.

The fact that agent accounts and user accounts are separate and distinct also means that you can delete an agent without inadvertently deleting any user account that the agent might have. If the agent does have a user account, that account is not tied to their agent account, and will not be deleted when the agent account is deleted.

To create an agent, complete the following procedure:

From the Manage Agents page, click Create Agent:
On the Create Agent page, enter the new agent’s email address in the Agent Email field, and then select the desired role.
If you have enabled user profile access restrictions, you’ll have the option of limiting the profiles that the agent can access. To restrict access to a specified set of profiles, click the Only Allowed For list and then select the profile types that the agent will be able to access. (This option is available only if you have enabled access restrictions.) For example, if you limit access by country and you want the agent to only be allowed to manage profiles for users from the US and Canada, then select both US and CA from the allowed-for list:
Click Save.

After you click Save, an invitation to join the agents group is automatically sent to the agent and the agent is tentatively listed on the Manage Agents paged as Pending Invitation:

To complete the agent assignment process, the prospective agent must click the link in the email and then do one of two things: 1) logon to the site if they already have an account; or, 2) complete the registration form to create a new account.

If logon/registration succeeds, a message similar to the following is displayed:

By clicking OK, the new agent is automatically logged on to the Console. At the same time, the Manage Agents page updates to show that the invitation has been accepted.

And that is the entire process, from start to finish.

But what if you create a new agent and then think better of that? That’s fine; from the Manage Agents page, click the invited agent’s name to display the Invitation Actions dialog box:

From there you have three choices:

Resend the invitation email.
Edit the invitation (which means changing the agent’s access permissions and then sending a new invitation).
Revoke the invitation altogether.

If you choose to revoke the invitation, the invited agent disappears from the Manage Agents page. If the uninvited agent clicks the link in their original invitation email and attempts to log on to the Console, their logon will succeed, but they won’t have access to any part of the Console. That’s because the invitation URL is no longer valid.

And what if you’re too late, and the agent has already registered? That’s fine: you can always delete an agent any time you want.