Nobody wants a former employee to keep reading customer conversations. Removing someone from the team closes all of their access to that portfolio in one move and releases the work assigned to them. This guide covers the removal, its consequences, and the alternatives worth considering first.
⚠️ Note: Only the portfolio can remove a member. Admins send invitations and change roles but never see the button. Nobody can remove themselves, and the portfolio owner cannot be removed.
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Remove
Before you remove someone
Removal drops the conversations assigned to that person back to unassigned. Nothing is lost, but they are left without an owner — so before they turn into a customer question nobody notices:
In the inbox, set the Assignee filter to that person and look at their open conversations.
Assign the ones that must continue to another agent by hand.
If the portfolio's assignment rule is set to Always the same person and that person is the one leaving, update the rule now. See Chat assignment rules.
Skip these steps and no work disappears, but the conversations land in the Unassigned pool and have to be picked up from there.
Removing the member
Open the account switcher, click the gear icon next to the portfolio name and go to Team.
Open the Members section and find the person's row. If the list is long, use Next at the bottom to change page.
Click Remove on the right of the row.
The panel's own confirmation window opens. Under the Are you sure? heading it reads "Remove … from the team? Chats assigned to them become unassigned."; its buttons are Cancel and Remove. Press Remove.
A "Member removed." notice appears and the row leaves the list. The seat is freed at the same moment.
What happens when you remove someone
The portfolio disappears from their panel. Every account in the portfolio drops out of their account switcher, and typing the address by hand will not open it.
Conversations assigned to them are released. Across all of the portfolio's accounts, their open conversations lose their assignee and become Unassigned.
The assignment rule protects itself. If the portfolio's automatic assignment was set to Always the same person and that person was them, the rule is switched off; the system does not quietly keep assigning chats to a member who no longer exists.
A seat is freed. The number in the team badge drops and you can invite someone new.
History is not deleted. The messages they sent to customers, the notes they left and the changes they made stay in the conversation history and in the portfolio logs. Removal is not a clean-up; it only closes access.
Their user account is not deleted. Their own user account, any portfolios of their own and their memberships in other portfolios are untouched.
The action is written to the portfolio logs too: on Portfolio settings › Logs you see a "Removed a member" row with the removed person's name underneath. See The record of team changes.
Alternatives to removal
Not every situation calls for removal. There are three ways to narrow someone's view while they stay in the team:
Lower their role. Make them a Viewer and they read everything but change nothing. Handy for an employee on extended leave.
Narrow their account access. If you only handed over one account, closing the others is enough. See Limiting access per account.
Tighten the access policy. You can narrow the sections and conversation scope of a role at portfolio level; this affects everyone in that role. See When a screen is missing.
💡 If the person will not be working with you again, removal is the right answer: lowering a role narrows access, it does not close it.
When a member wants to leave
There is no "leave the team" button in the panel; nobody can end their own membership. If a colleague wants out, they tell the portfolio owner and the owner presses Remove. This is deliberate: in a shared inbox, someone walking out on their own and leaving ownerless conversations behind is exactly what you do not want.
Warnings when removal does not work
"Only the portfolio owner can remove members." — You are an admin. Pass it to the owner.
"You cannot remove yourself from the team." — Your own row has no Remove button in the first place; both the interface and the server enforce the rule.
"The portfolio owner cannot be removed." — Ownership is not a membership to be revoked. To close the portfolio altogether, use Portfolio settings › Delete portfolio.
"This portfolio is scheduled for deletion; this action is not available." — The team cannot change until the deletion is called off. See The portfolio is locked.
"The record you are looking for was not found." — The person may have been removed after you opened the page. Refresh it.
Common mistakes
Removing before handing over their conversations. Open chats fall into the Unassigned pool and start waiting there. Check the Assignee filter first.
Treating removal as data deletion. What they wrote stays; the customer history is not damaged.
Assuming they cannot be invited back. You can invite the same address again; their old assignments do not return, but new work can be assigned.
Not checking the assignment rule afterwards. If the rule switched itself off, new chats are no longer assigned to anyone. Reopen it with a new choice.
If you followed every step and the person still sees the portfolio, ask them to sign out and back in; if it persists, contact our Support team.