Tech Talk On CTI Connectors

Tech talks are knowledge sharing sessions conducted bi-weekly at NovelVox. This week, we had a session on CTI Connectors by Vineet Arora on July 22, 2020.

About CTI Connectors

There are many applications that a Contact Center uses to enhance customer experience and boost agent performance. CRM and Ticketing Solutions are some of the widely-used applications that serve this purpose. However, having these applications as standalone does serve the purpose, but as we know, survival in any industry always demands more – more features, more flexibility; the industry started looking for options that can add value and lead to more satisfied customers.

When a contact center uses CRM and Ticketing solutions as standalone applications, they limit their agents to a single application, forcing them to juggle between multiple screens and applications to access data.

How does a CTI Connector help?

A CTI connector lets you integrate your third-party Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) systems with your CRM or ticketing applications so that your agents have complete control of all information. This means an agent using Salesforce gets all the telephony control functionalities (as provided by the in-use telephony system e.g. Cisco, Avaya, etc.) right inside the salesforce screen. He can simultaneously make/receive calls and access salesforce data without screen toggling.

With a CTI connector, you can make calls from a softphone directly in CRM without installing CTI adapters on your machines. To display CTI functionality in any CRM, a CTI connector majorly uses browsers as clients.

Out of the Features

A CTI Connector comes with a powerful-suit of features listed below:

• Screen Pop/CRM Screen Transfer: Ability to showcase on-call customer information in the CRM for instant data sharing.
• Call Logging: Ability to automatically create call logs in the CRM to save the call details for that can be used to monitor agent performance in the future.
• Click To Dial: Ability to call a contact without dialing the number. Search the contact in CRM, get a “phone icon” against the contact’s name, and click to dial.
• Intelligent Dialing: Ability to fetch the country code and region code based on the customer’s demographic details while making a call from the CTI.
• Auto-login: Ability to save the agent’s login details both in CRM and CTI to save him from entering account details on every login.
• Speed Dial: Ability to configure agent contacts on speed dials for quick dialing.

How does a Connector work?

Connectors are designed and developed as an adapter first. Before integrating with a third-party application, they work as a simple plugin called adapters. The main job of such plugins is to interact with the Telephony system and send notifications through a messaging protocol. Required events are propagated from a Plugin and listened at the Connector side.

Practical Session

Following points have been covered in the practical session of this tech Talk:

• Walkthrough of the CTI Plugin
• Walkthrough of Salesforce CTI connector
• Walkthrough of Freshdesk Connector

This was a snapshot of our last Tech Talk held on CTI Connectors by Vineet Arora. NovelVoxians gained valuable insights on how a connector works with the help of real-time CTI walkthroughs.