Computer-telephony integration (CTI) systems are often used in conjunction with CRM software to provide quality contact center solutions to a company’s end-customers. Hence, Open CTI is used in Salesforce to achieve customer-company connections.
What is Open CTI?
Open CTI is a tool used to create and integrate remote CTI systems with Salesforce’s Call Center feature. It’s basically a JavaScript API that uses JavaScript browser pages as its clients.
What Users Get from Open CTI
Before the advent of Open CTI systems, Salesforce users are mandated to install a Desktop CTI adapter in their machines to be able to make web-based softphone calls. But now, there’s no need to install CTI adapters on the Salesforce user’s machines. By using Open CTI, users can freely make calls inside Salesforce.
Call control tools can also be created and customized to fit the user’s needs and preferences. With CTI, creation of softphones that function as integrated parts of the entire Salesforce console become easier and faster.
Open CTI also allows its users to access CTI systems across several kinds of browsers and platforms. Open CTI for Salesforce works on Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox, respectively.
Special Considerations
- Open CTI implementations for Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience are separate, distinct, and cannot be used interchangeably.
- Open CTI can only be used on JavaScript pages. Ensure that JavaScript is enabled on the machine being used.
- Knowledge of basic CTI, JavaScript, and Visualforce is highly recommended before using Open CTI toolkits with Salesforce.
Connecting and Using Open CTI
Using Open CTI for Salesforce requires some level of coding. Connecting to Open CTI requires the user to write code that makes the CTI toolkit available to JavaScript codes.
- A user first embeds JavaScript on either Visualforce Pages or on Third-Party Domains. The code syntax is actually different for these two.
- Then, the Open CTI Demo Adapter is used. It’s used to test if Open CTI for Lightning Experience can be used for the org. The code for this adapter is available on GitHub.
- Next, enable asynchronous call process. Add an extra parameter called callback function to the code to enable this function.
Lastly, be sure that the codes created for enabling and working with Open CTI are compatible with the Salesforce interface being used (Classic/Salesforce Console or Lightning Experience).