End users vs. users: who's a customer, who's on your team

Two of the most-used words in Ochre are user and end user. They sound similar and that's the problem. Get them confused once and you'll grant the wrong access, count the wrong seats, or run the wrong report. Here's the difference, plainly.

The short version

• An end user is a customer of yours: someone who writes into your support inbox or chats with your help center.
• A user is a member of your team: someone who answers those conversations or administers the workspace.

End users have profiles and can have history. They cannot log in to Ochre. Users have logins and roles, can answer conversations and configure the workspace, and count toward your billable seat total.

Why it matters

If you say "add this person as a user", that grants a teammate access to your workspace. If you mean "add this customer to my customer list", you mean end user. Saying it the wrong way once can mean granting a customer access to your inbox.

This article is the canonical reference. When you read other articles in the help center, end user always means a customer, and user always means a teammate.

End users in detail

Every customer who has ever written in (or been imported, or attached via an integration) is an end user.

• Identity: name, email, profile picture, optional aliases.
• History: every conversation across every channel.
• Custom fields: per-org attributes you define. See custom-fields.
• Integration context: Stripe, HubSpot, anything else connected. See customer-360.
• Aliases: secondary emails or original ticket IDs from imports.

End users:

• Cannot log in to Ochre.
• Are not granted permissions or roles.
• Are not billed.
• Are subject to GDPR delete and export. See gdpr.

There's no upper limit on end users. A workspace with 50 million end users costs the same as one with 50.

Users in detail

Every member of your support or admin team is a user.

• Identity: name, email, profile picture, login credentials.
• Role: owner, admin, agent, light agent, or custom role. See roles-explained.
• Permissions: scoped by role and inbox membership. See roles-permissions.
• Notification preferences: per-user.

Users:

• Log in to Ochre via email magic link (SSO available on request for Scale-tier customers).
• Are billable as seats. See seats-and-roles.
• Can answer conversations, set workspace config, and (depending on role) administer billing and security.
• Show up in agent-leaderboard and other reports.

Different tables, different scopes

End users and users live in completely different parts of the workspace. They are not interchangeable, and there is no path to "promote" an end user into a user. If a customer becomes a teammate (it happens), you create a new user record and invite them with their work email. Their old end user record stays in place as their customer history.

The reverse also applies. If a teammate leaves, removing their user does not delete their end-user-side history (if they ever wrote into your support themselves).

Common confusions

A few patterns that trip teams up.

"I want to add a customer to my team"

You mean two different things. To let a customer log in: invite them as a user. They will count as a seat and have access to your inbox. This is rarely what you want. To track them as a customer: they're already an end user the moment they wrote in. You don't add anything.

"Why is my seat count off"

Seat counts only include users. End users never count. If your bill looks off, check the team page, not the customers page.

"Can a customer see my internal notes"

No. Internal notes are only visible to users. End users only see public messages. See internal-notes.

"Can a teammate write in as a customer for testing"

Yes. They can email your support address from a non-team account, and Ochre will create or match an end user with that email. This is a normal way to test first-conversation flows.

Inviting and managing

To add a teammate, see inviting-your-team and inviting-team-members. To manage customers, see customer-search and customer-merge.

When in doubt, the test is simple. If they're going to log in, they're a user. If they're going to write in, they're an end user.