How to Record Your Screen for a Customer Support Ticket
A screen recording that shows exactly what went wrong gets your support ticket resolved faster than any text description. Here's what to capture, how to keep the file small, and what to do with it.
Support tickets that include a screen recording get resolved faster. This isn’t a guess — it’s the consistent experience of every support team that tracks resolution time by ticket type. A recording shows the exact steps, the exact error message, and the exact behavior the user saw. A text description, no matter how detailed, introduces ambiguity at every step.
This guide covers what to capture, how to make the file small enough to attach, and what context to add alongside it.
What to record
A useful support recording answers three questions before anyone has to ask:
What were you doing right before it happened? Start recording one or two steps before the problem. If a button isn’t responding, start from the page you navigated to before clicking it, not from the moment of the click. Context matters — the problem might not be the button, it might be something that happened upstream.
What happened? Let the recording run through the full failure — the click, the wait, the error message, the unexpected behavior. Don’t stop recording the moment something goes wrong; include what the screen shows in the seconds after.
What did you expect to happen? This one doesn’t require footage — you’ll include it in the ticket text alongside the recording. But knowing what the expected behavior was is essential for the support team to understand whether they’re looking at a bug, a configuration problem, or a misunderstanding.
How to record with ScreenKit
- Click the ScreenKit extension icon in your browser toolbar.
- Choose Tab to record only the browser tab with the issue, or Screen to record your full screen including other applications if the issue involves something outside the browser.
- Start the recording, reproduce the issue, then stop.
- Preview the clip and trim if needed to remove unnecessary time before or after the relevant action.
- Download or copy the file.
For support tickets, tab recording is usually the right choice — it avoids accidentally capturing other open windows, notifications, or anything else on your screen.
Keeping file size manageable
Support ticket file size limits vary: many systems cap attachments at 10MB, some at 25MB. A raw screen recording can exceed these limits in seconds for high-resolution screens.
Two settings affect file size most:
Frame rate. Most software bugs and UI issues don’t require 30 or 60 fps to communicate clearly. A recording at 10–15 fps is perfectly readable for support purposes and produces files roughly half the size of 30 fps. ScreenKit defaults to a frame rate appropriate for the content type, but you can lower it in settings if you’re working around a file size limit.
Recording area. If the issue is confined to one part of the screen — a modal dialog, a specific panel — recording only that region instead of the full screen reduces file size substantially. Use region recording if your screen is large and the problem is small.
Intermittent bugs: how to catch something that doesn’t happen reliably
Intermittent failures are the hardest thing to document in a support ticket. “It happens sometimes when I scroll quickly” is difficult to act on.
Two approaches help:
Record longer and trim later. Start recording when you begin the session and keep it running until the bug appears. Then trim the clip down to the relevant 10–20 seconds. This is more efficient than trying to hit record at exactly the right moment.
Add a text note about frequency. Even if you can’t capture the bug on demand, a note like “This happens approximately 1 in 3 times when I click Submit after having been on the form for more than 5 minutes” is far more actionable than “sometimes it doesn’t work.”
What to include in the ticket alongside the recording
A recording with no context still requires work on the support team’s end. Include:
- Browser and version (Help → About in most browsers)
- Operating system
- What you expected to happen (one sentence)
- Whether this is reproducible every time, sometimes, or once
- Any error messages shown on screen — even if they’re visible in the recording, typing them out makes the ticket text searchable
The combination of a focused recording and these four pieces of context is the format most likely to move your ticket to resolution without a back-and-forth asking for the information anyway.
When a screenshot is enough
Not everything needs a recording. A static error state — a page that fails to load, an error message at rest, a form that renders incorrectly — is better documented with a screenshot. Screenshots are smaller, easier to attach, and just as informative for anything that isn’t a sequence of actions.
Use a recording when the problem is a behavior that unfolds over time. Use a screenshot when the problem is a state.