Providing people-based customer support. It is an umbrella term for all the interactive options for serving customers, including regular phone support, Web-based text chat and voice chat, application sharing, desktop sharing (remote control), file transfer and collaborative browsing.

Collaborative systems are more flexible than automated solutions for helping customers with orders and solving customer problems; however, they are more time consuming than automated solutions, because people are involved. Automated systems also cost less to operate, but are best suited to high volume, repetitive tasks. See CRM, collaborative browsing and remote control software.