The Zendesk Users List
The Zendesk users list holds every person who has ever emailed you, alongside your staff. Knowing how to slice it is most of user administration.
The Zendesk users list holds several kinds of person
Zendesk stores everybody as a user, and a role decides what they are. That single design choice explains most of the confusion.
Team members are managed in Admin Center. Customers are managed from the customers list in the agent interface. Two doors into what's fundamentally one directory, which is why people spend ten minutes looking for a settings page that isn't where they expect it.
The practical consequence is a size difference nobody warns you about. Your team list has twelve rows. Your customer list has ninety thousand, because it grew by one every time anybody emailed you, and it will never shrink on its own.
Filtering that actually narrows it
Scrolling isn't a strategy once you have fifty thousand end users. Search properly instead.
The search syntax works on users the same way it works on tickets: filter by role, by organization, by tag, by creation date, by whether somebody's suspended. Combining two conditions gets you to a workable list far faster than any amount of sorting, and it's the difference between a two-minute job and an afternoon.
For anything you need repeatedly, build a user segment instead of retyping a query. Segments are also what gate help centre content, so the work does double duty.
And use organizations properly. An organization turns "everyone at this customer" from a search into a relationship, which is what makes account-level reporting and routing possible at all.
Getting the list out
Three routes, in increasing order of power.
Going the other way, bulk changes come from a CSV import or the API. Both are covered in bulk importing users. Test on ten rows before you run twenty thousand, because there's no undo button on a bad import and the fastest way to create ten thousand duplicate users is a CSV with the wrong email column mapped.
Three lists worth pulling once a quarter
None of these take long, and each one usually finds something.
Put the results somewhere shared with the date on it. A user list only rots when nobody is looking, and looking four times a year is enough.
Keeping the list clean
User lists rot quietly, and nobody notices until they're doing something else. Four habits stop it.
Merge duplicate people, don't delete them. The same human writing from a work address and a personal one creates two user records. The fix is adding the second address as a secondary email on one record, or merging the users so their history stays together. See merging users.
Suspend rather than delete for spam and abuse, so the history survives and future mail from that address is contained.
Downgrade departed staff promptly. An agent who left is a seat you are still paying for, every month, quietly.
Handle deletion requests properly. Erasure is permanent and it interacts with your reporting, so follow the process rather than improvising. See GDPR in Zendesk.
One consequence worth naming: two user records for the same person also mean their tickets never look related. Same problem, same human, two identities, and nobody notices. That's a duplicate hiding behind a data quality problem, and tidying the user list finds more of them than any amount of triage discipline does.
Frequently asked questions
Where is the list of users in Zendesk?
Team members live in Admin Center. Customers, meaning end users, live in the customers list in the agent interface. Both are the same underlying directory split by role.
How do I export Zendesk users to CSV?
Request an export from the account, and Zendesk prepares it as a job and emails you a download link. For scheduled or filtered pulls, use the users API instead.
Do end users count towards my Zendesk bill?
No. You pay per agent seat. End users are unlimited and free, which is why the list grows to enormous sizes without anyone noticing.
How do I find duplicate users in Zendesk?
Search by name and by email domain, and check for people with similar names across two addresses. Merging them keeps the ticket history together on one record.
What happens to tickets if I delete a user?
Deletion is destructive and affects associated data, so suspend or merge instead unless you're handling a genuine erasure request.
One person, two records, two tickets
Duplicate user records hide duplicate tickets. Ticket Merger matches on requester, subject keywords and ticket fields inside a time window, so it catches what a tidy list reveals.
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