Over a period of time, you will have a lot of employees and requesters interacting with your service desk as they report issues and submit service requests. To make things more convenient, you probably want to create contacts for your requesters inside Freshservice before you get started. 


You can create requesters in Freshservice one by one or import them in bulk from a CSV file. You can even create departments and add requesters under them for better classification.


In this article:

 

Add requesters in Freshservice

  • Go to Admin > User Management > Requesters.

  • If your account has more than one workspace, navigate to Admin > Global Settings > User Management > Requesters.

  • Click on the New Requester button.




  • Fill in all the details of the contact like Name, Email, Job Title, etc.

  • If the agent belongs to an existing department, start typing the first few letters and select it from the list.

  • Optionally type in his phone numbers, timezone, time format, and background information.

  • Once you are done, click Save Changes.


The requester has now been added to your service desk. You could similarly add as many contacts as needed.


After you are done creating requesters, you can also change any details given by choosing the Edit option displayed next to every requester.


Deactivate requesters in Freshservice

In order to deactivate a requester, you can navigate to Admin > User Management > Requesters. If your account has more than one workspace, navigate to Admin > Global Settings > User Management > Requesters > Requester Name > Edit > More > Deactivate Requester.




What happens when you deactivate a requester?

  • The requester will not be able to log in to Freshservice. In case of reactivation, the admin can navigate to Admin > User Management > Requesters. If your account has more than one workspace, navigate to Admin > Global Settings > User Management > Requesters > Requester Name > Reactivate.
  • The requester will be removed from all requester groups.
  • The requester's name will be retained in all tickets, changes, problems, and releases with Resolved and Closed statuses.
  • The requester will automatically be removed from all account-level configurations except workflow automator and supervisor in which they will have to be manually removed from the associated workflows.
  • The requester's name will be retained for hardware assets under the“Used By" and "Managed By" fields. 
  • The requester's name will be retained for software assets under the "Managed By" field.


Validation and sanitization updates to user data

To improve data quality and system consistency, new validation and sanitization rules for user and organization information have been introduced. These changes will ensure that data entered into our system is clean and properly formatted.

We have implemented input sanitization for the following fields, wherein certain special characters will be automatically removed from these fields upon entry:

  • User fields: firstNamelastNamephonecompanyNamejobTitlesocial URLs (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)

  • Organization fields: address

The behavior will differ based on how the data is submitted:

  • In the user interface (UI): If a user enters an invalid character, they will receive an immediate validation error to correct the input.

  • Via API/gRPC: If a request contains invalid characters, the system will automatically remove (truncate) them from the relevant field without returning an error.

  • Fields with only invalid characters: If a field contains only invalid characters (for example, a companyName entered as <>%&), the field will be cleared and saved as empty (null).

Examples of changes

Here are few examples on how the sanitization works:

Field

Before

After

firstName

Jo<hn

John

lastName

An"na

Anna

phone

123@456

123456

companyName

Tech/"Corp

TechCorp

jobTitle

C<TO

CTO

address

"One Way" Building

One Way Building


Impact on existing data

Note that some existing user and organization data may contain characters that are now considered invalid. If an existing account is updated or transferred, the data in the fields listed above will be automatically cleaned according to the new rules.