An important step in setting up your Zendesk Chat account is configuring how to authenticate staff members and end users, collectively referred to as users in this article.

The authentication options for end users apply to Help Center access only. You can require end users to sign in to your Help Center to submit or view their tickets on a web page. To authenticate end users who use the Web Widget, see Enabling authenticated visitors in the integrated Web Widget.

You can authenticate users in Chat by using Zendesk's own user authentication (the standard sign-in process) or you can remotely authenticate users using single sign-on (SSO) and then seamlessly sign them in to Zendesk. You can also let users sign in using popular business or social authentication services such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or X (formerly Twitter).

The settings are managed in Admin Center, a separate Zendesk application. For details, see Single sign-on (SSO) options in Zendesk.

To access the authentication settings from Chat

1. From the Chat dashboard, select Settings > Account, then click the Security tab.
2. Select Manage under Authentication Options.

   Admin Center will open automatically.

If you use Zendesk authentication, you can manage additional security settings. See the following topics:

• Restricting access to Zendesk Support and your help center using IP restrictions
• Managing two-factor authentication for agents and admins
• Understanding and customizing session time-out settings