Tech Talk on Cisco CTI Connector

Tech talks are knowledge sharing sessions conducted bi-weekly at NovelVox. This week, we had a session on the Cisco CTI Connector by Nishant Tiwari and Utsav Kumar on July 8, 2020.

What’s a CTI

CTI is an abbreviation for Computer-telephony integration, a technology that allows computers to control telephone systems. Having a CTI integrated into your computer allows you to perform call control operations directly from your system while ensuring enhanced productivity, better quality, and reduced operational costs.

How it works in Cisco

Cisco CTI enables the Cisco Telephony System to receive telephony information and control telephony functions through Unified CCX/CCE. Cisco CTI Connector is seen as a TCP/IP socket-based message protocol that allows clients to send and receive information about:

• Current system configuration and future updates.
• Agents and their states
• Calls and their states
• Statistics for agents, calls, and queues on a real-time basis
• Third-party call control

Architecture – Cisco Unified CCX

Architecture – Cisco Unified CCE

Role of CTI Manager

In the above architecture, the CTI Manager acts as a CTI server that uses JTAPI (Java Telephony API) for communication. It is a program that includes the CTI components interfacing with the applications that are separated out of the Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

Cisco Finesse and NovelVox

Cisco Finesse is the next-generation agent and supervisor desktop designed to integrate traditional contact center functions into a thin-client desktop. It’s a 100% browser-based desktop application that can be implemented through a web interface and does not requires client-side installations.

Cisco Finesse provides two types of APIS:

• REST APIs: for building custom applications and/or integrating into existing applications.
• JavaScript Library APIs: for building custom gadgets to be added to the Finesse out of the box desktop.

REST APIs provided by Cisco Finesse help perform agent and supervisor actions programmatically. They are easy to use and work well in thick and thin client integrations.

How NovelVox implements it

NovelVox uses Cisco CTI and its APIs to perform actions like call answer, state change, etc. on an agent or call and listen to events like state change events, call ringing events, etc. Depending upon these events/triggers, certain actions are performed that include getting call records for logged in agent or getting previous interaction history for the calling number and so on.

Practical Session

Apart from getting the technical insights of Cisco CTI Connector, NovelVoxians also took a practical session on Cisco Finesse CTI and learned how it works in real-time. This was a brief about the tech talk conducted by NovelVoxians Utsav Kumar and Nishant Tiwari on Cisco CTI.