4 Downsides of Using Screen Sharing Solutions in Customer Service and How to Avoid Them

Screen sharing solutions are used on a daily basis in a wide variety of areas, such as conference calls, interviews, product demos, troubleshooting and even for personal use like connecting with our closed ones.

While screen sharing solutions might seem like the perfect fit in your customer support process, they have their limitations. Here is a list of the 4 downsides of using screen sharing solutions and their effect on customer satisfaction and team’s productivity.

Installing additional software is expensive

Oftentimes, during a support session, it might turn out that the support team lacks context and they need to see the user’s issue so they need to quickly set up a screen sharing session. The problem here is that the user needs to install the same software the support team uses.

In some cases, that’s simple and takes up a few minutes. In others, however, it might be a huge hassle. Corporations and governments often have the policy to use only specific internally approved screen sharing vendors which means that either the user needs to install this tool or the team might have to look for other solutions.

Not only that but also some users are just not technical enough. While setting up and configuring a solution might take a few minutes to a tech-savvy person, it could turn out to be a tedious process for a non-tech user.

Both of these can cause frustration to your users since they’re spending their own time in attempts to help you, help them.

Not only dissatisfactory, but this can even be pretty expensive for your company.

Let’s look at a real case with one of our customers — a big US hosting provider.

They have 500 support agents that are constantly handling support requests in real-time with a telephony software solution. On average, a support agent of theirs handles 20 support requests per day and each support request is approximately 25 minutes long.

Now let’s do some math.

On a daily basis, the whole support team spends:

(20 support requests x 25 minutes x 500 support agents ) / 60 minutes = 4 166 human hours per day

On a monthly basis the support team spends:

4 166 human hours per day x 22 workdays per month = 91 666 human hours per month

In the case of our customer, 25% of the support sessions require a screen sharing session which means the support team spends 22 916 human hours on support sessions that involve screen sharing each month.

With an average support session of 25 minutes, 4 minutes are spent on installation and setup (according to our customer). This means 16% of the total support session is devoted to setting up the screen sharing solution.

Putting this into perspective:

16% screen sharing installation process x 22 916 human hours support via screen sharing = 3 666 human hours spent.

Meaning that 153 days of a 500-agents support team are spent into installing and configuring screen sharing software. Multiply that by the average monthly salary of a support agent and you’ll see how much screen sharing setup costs you.

Of course, these numbers are based on one particular company, but the impact is significant for everyone working at scale.

As it is time-consuming and not always intuitive, screen sharing can be frustrating for both the end-user and your agents and it’s definitely expensive for your company.

Your team is already using too many tools

Screen sharing delivers value and improves the customer experience, but do we really need additional software to achieve our goal?

We’ve been talking with support teams of all sizes, ranging from startups and scale-ups to enterprises with support organizations comprising of thousands of people. What’s common between all of them is that they are using multiple solutions to create the desired workflow.

For example, a team could use one solution for live-chat, another one for ticketing, and the third one for telephony. The reason isn’t the lack of all-in-one support platforms like Zendesk or Freshdesk, rather it’s the fact that those single solutions offer additional, sometimes superior features that better address the needs of the support teams compared to the same tool in the all-in-one providers.

For example, lots of companies are using a combination of Intercom’s live chat and Zendesk’s ticketing. It’s not that Zendesk doesn’t have their own live chat, it’s just that Intercom is more feature-rich and it fits greatly into workflows of both startups and enterprises.

Managing a wide range of tools could be a nuisance, especially in bigger organizations where the volume of requests piles up daily. How do you properly match your Zendesk tickets to Jira issues? How do you easily find Intercom’s chat sessions and match them with your Zendesk’s tickets?

When you are using different software providers, it’s a hassle to merge all of the data, even though each tool alone provides significant value.

Adding a screen sharing solution on top of that further complicates the process for the support agents.

Prolonged time on documenting issues

Usually, the support teams need to document each support session after it ends into the ticket so that all of the information gathered by the agent remains stored in the system.

With screen sharing, once the issue is solved, the user might request additional help. That’s not uncommon. In the case of a hosting provider, for example, the user might have initially requested only domain setup support. However, during the screen sharing session, they realize they could utilize the agent to do extra work for them. Why not use the opportunity to get their billing set up for them, for instance. The agent cannot decline the user request so they end up fixing it for them. This prolongs the support session.

However, even though the team’s productivity might have decreased slightly due to the additional unexpected support provided, the overall CSAT might actually be increased thanks to the personalized experience. According to Accenture 83% of consumers would have been impacted by better live/in-person customer-service.

The downside is that after the session ends, the support agent needs to document everything, which now turns out to be much more than it should have been.

Back-and-forth communication remains

Regardless of industry or size, in any organization, some support requests turn out to be bugs. And bugs cannot be resolved in one session by the support team alone. They need to forward them to the dev team.

With most screen sharing solutions, the sessions are neither recorded nor stored which means they cannot be replayed and further investigated by the engineering team.

Without the ability to record the session, the customer support agent has to request from the user to make screenshots while interacting so they can escalate the issue to the dev team.

The problem is that you not only made your user install and set-up a screen sharing solution but also requested from them to take screenshots while reproducing the defect in your product. Regardless of the positive attitude of your support agents during the process, it’s a fact that you made your user do additional work without resolving his issue in the screen-sharing session. It’s inevitable that your CSAT will be negatively affected.

You can avoid all of these downsides 100% of the time

Some of the above downsides might not affect your team now but if there’s even a slight chance they will in the future, wouldn’t you try to avoid them?

Thankfully, nowadays there are products and technologies that allow your teams to overcome these risks.

Ideally, this is how the process should look like:

• Great visibility for your team: Your agents have the ability to immediately see the screen of your users and help them in real-time
• No friction for the end-users: Your users don’t need to install and configure any software, neither send screenshots or explanations
• No need to document support requests: All the data during the support session is automatically collected and added to a support ticket
• No back-and-forth communication: The development team has access to all of the data gathered during the support session and can replicate and understand everything without the need of any additional context
• No changes to your workflow: There is no need to change your existing support workflow and train your support team

This is not a fiction scenario. Companies are already doing it!

SessionStack is a product we’ve developed with the sole purpose to optimize the work of support teams around the world by addressing the downsides of screen sharing.

SessionStack can be directly integrated into your web app/website using a small JavaScript snippet. Here is how SessionStack can significantly improve customer support workflow and customer experience.

• Great visibility for your team: SessionStack provides co-browsing functionality which allows your team members to interact with your users while seeing everything that is happening to the users in real-time. The same way you do it with screen-sharing solutions. Though, since SessionStack is integrated into your product, on top of the visual information, you can also have access to information about the device, browser, layout engine, network and debug data. This allows your team to easily diagnose potential issues during your support sessions.
• No friction for the end-users: Since SessionStack is integrated into your web app/website, it works automatically. Your users don’t need to download any software or install additional plugins. All the data is being streamed directly from your web app.
• No need to document support requests: You can configure SessionStack to record the support sessions which you can easily add as a video to your ticketing software. Now, you have all of the information from the support session fully replayable. What else do you need to document?
• No back-and-forth communication: With a click of a button, the development team can replay the recorded session. They not only can watch a video of everything that happened to the user but also have access to everything that happened under the hood in the browser. They can debug it step by step.
• No changes to your workflow: SessionStack can by directly integrated into your support solutions and no workflow changes are needed. If you’re using live chat, telephony, ticketing or any other software, SessionStack can be integrated with it and enhance your work process without changing the workflow. This means no additional training for your support agents.

In case you’re interested, you can try our free-trial and explore SessionStack: