Getting started with Salesforce CTI
CTI, or computer telephony integration, is a key element of an omnichannel customer service strategy. Salesforce CTI is one of the most popular methods used to connect organizations’ telephone and computer systems. CTI allows data to be used and sent between computers, phones, and other core service and sales systems, such as CRM.
CTI for Salesforce allows phone conversations and calls to be made into data. For customer-facing teams, Salesforce CTI enables them with:
- Automatic transcriptions of phone conversations.
- Screen pops with information about an account or customer.
- Automated routing for incoming calls.
- Click-to-dial or auto-dialing embedded within the SFDC interface.
Business benefits of CTI for Salesforce
Businesses without CTI to their CRM leave their employees vulnerable to inefficiencies. This means manually entering notes from phone conversations into their CRM, not having the right information readily available while on a call, or wasting time on manual dials and routing.
With CTI for Salesforce, businesses remove the inefficiencies from these processes and create a system that promotes highly productive employees and workflows.
How Salesforce CTI works
CTI for Salesforce relies on a few types of integration patterns, mainly bidirectional sync and aggregation. It creates bidirectional communication between Salesforce and the telephony system, while also aggregating the data onto the employee’s desktop, which has a softphone system within the browser.
Creating this bidirectional pattern is critical since this enables both systems to input and receives data from the other. The data aggregation aspect of this is also important because the employee engages with these integrations and accesses customer data via a desktop interface.
Salesforce CTI requires a set of APIs to make each of these systems and devices communicate. The telephony system and the agent’s web browser, which includes a softphone application, are connected through a CTI system API. The browser and softphone connect to one of the Salesforce clouds using an open CTI JavaScript API.
These two APIs create the bidirectional sync needed to send information (phone numbers, power dial links) from Salesforce into the telephony system and to send phone conversation data (transcriptions) back into Salesforce.
Creating Salesforce CTI with an application network
Connecting Salesforce to a telephony system using point-to-point integration can cause a few problems for IT teams and businesses as a whole.
- IT teams create duplicate APIs as new systems require a connection to Salesforce or telephony system, wasting time IT teams don’t have to spare.
- Slows down the integration process and prevents the business from innovating quickly with new system integrations.
- Individual APIs between these major systems become unwieldy, messy, and make it difficult to get a clear, single view of which systems are integrated or need maintenance.
Building Salesforce CTI with an application network solves these point-to-point challenges. An application network is a form of API-led connectivity that allows IT teams to integrate their applications, data, and devices and all of their assets and data on the network.
Through an application network, these APIs can be reused; speeding up the process of connecting systems and preventing IT teams from creating the same custom code over and over again. Because an application network is a collection of APIs, they can be grouped by process or experience, so a set of APIs can be reused.
With CTI for Salesforce, rather than manually creating these two API codes, IT teams can build this customer interaction process with reusable APIs every time a new Salesforce cloud is added or a telephony enablement tool needs to be connected. And since the correct APIs are already built-in, teams other than IT can integrate systems on their own. This self-service integration leads to faster innovation across the business and less IT time spent creating duplicate code.
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