5 ways to let customers share their screens with you

When customers get in touch with tricky support issues that are hard to explain, you might need to see what they’re seeing to understand what’s going on.

In this article, we cover five methods of doing this, each with their unique advantages and disadvantages.

Jump ahead

• Scheduling a video call
• Remote Desktop
• Cobrowsing
• Session recording
• Video messages

Scheduling a video call

After a few attempts at diagnosing an issue with email or live chat, scheduling a call is a good option, especially now that most people are familiar & comfortable with services like Zoom and Skype.

Services like Calendly make it easy to schedule times for a call and once you’re on a video call with customers, sharing screens is fairly easy. For example, here are the screen sharing instructions for Zoom.

The benefits of this method is that you can take your time with the customer and guide them through the process of showing you their issue. Being on a call with with them is also helpful for understanding what they’re trying to achieve so you can recommend possible workarounds, even if the issue they encountered might not get resolved immediately.

The downside to this method is that both you and the customer need to block out a time in your calendar to for the call, which means the issue might not get resolved for a while. The call itself can also be time consuming, which isn’t ideal for you or for the customer who might just want their issue resolved so they can move onto other tasks.

Remote Desktop

This is a pretty heavy handed method that involves using a software to connect to a computer and control it remotely. It’s usually used by IT departments so they can easily manage & support all the computers at their firm, but it can also be used by customer support teams.

The main downside of this method is that both you and your customer have to have remote desktop software such as Team Viewer installed and configured.

The other downside, as with the video call option, is that both you and the customer need to be available while you connect to their desktop, so you will still need to arrange a time to make it happen.

Although heavy handed, using Remote Desktop can be a decent option when you’re trying to diagnose a truly tricky support issue that’s fairly technical.

Session recording

Similar to cobrowsing, session recording involves installing a Javascript snippet to your website. The difference is that session recording software is always recording what your customer is doing on your website. When they contact you with a support issue, you can view a video of what they were doing on your website before they got in touch.

This is the first asynchronous method in this list, which means that you can use session recording videos to diagnose support issues without your customer having to be around. No need to schedule a time with the customer.

As with cobrowsing, the main issue with session recording is that it only allows you to see what’s going on on your website, so it can fall short while diagnosing issues with integrations, extensions etc. Some people also find session recording a bit creepy as it involves all of your customers activities being recorded.

Fullstory and Hotjar are solid options for session recording.

If your business prefers to communicate asynchronously and has at least 1,000 customers who are less tech savvy, Screenjar is likely a great option for you. Try it free for 14 days.