Today's guest blogger is Luke Simpson, a Solutions Architect at Sonoma Partners
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) is becoming a much more common set of functionality within the Customer Service industry than it was just a few years ago, enabling many companies to be able to consider implementing solutions once reserved for 1000+ seat call centers. However, I have many customers that cringe a little when the idea of integrating phone systems with CRM comes up. Most anyone responsible for planning a CTI project inevitably has heard horror stories of ballooning budgets, partners that refuse to work well together and finally, implemented projects that just don’t deliver the goods! Often the common link in these stories is due to too many moving parts (managing the CRM software, the telephony service and the connector in-between). Sometimes the cause is bad technology or lack of understanding of the technology, and far too often the cause is a simple miscommunication on the goals of the project.
Having worked through several CTI projects in the past, after Sonoma Partners announced that we would be entering into a partnership with salesforce.com I thought that it would be interesting to look into how hard (or easy) it is to deploy standard CTI functionality within a Salesforce.com organization. Do the same “gotchas” apply? Are there any new things to worry about?
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) is becoming a much more common set of functionality within the Customer Service industry than it was just a few years ago, enabling many companies to be able to consider implementing solutions once reserved for 1000+ seat call centers. However, I have many customers that cringe a little when the idea of integrating phone systems with CRM comes up. Most anyone responsible for planning a CTI project inevitably has heard horror stories of ballooning budgets, partners that refuse to work well together and finally, implemented projects that just don’t deliver the goods! Often the common link in these stories is due to too many moving parts (managing the CRM software, the telephony service and the connector in-between). Sometimes the cause is bad technology or lack of understanding of the technology, and far too often the cause is a simple miscommunication on the goals of the project.
Having worked through several CTI projects in the past, after Sonoma Partners announced that we would be entering into a partnership with Salesforce.com I thought that it would be interesting to look into how hard (or easy) it is to deploy standard CTI functionality within a salesforce.com organization. Do the same “gotchas” apply? Are there any new things to worry about?
Why Computer Telephony Integration?
So what do you get with a CTI enabled salesforce.com organization? Or maybe a better question is, “Why would I integrate my telephony system with salesforce.com, and what is the end objective?”
As a general rule, the #1 reason why an organization implements CTI within their CRM system is to Save Money. The idea is to create efficiencies within the system that allow the organization to maximize the time of a user spent helping the customer and to minimize the amount of time spent searching or entering data into the system. How does CTI do that? To answer that question, let’s talk about the various terms associated with CTI and explain how they help your users:
The first bit of functionality that any CTI project will give to your users is called “Click-to-Dial”. Click-to-Dial functionality turns every phone number stored in your system into a URL that, when clicked, automatically dials the number from your telephone system. This allows your users to save a few seconds typing in phone numbers, and better yet drastically reduces the number of mis-dials that may occur.
The second, and generally most important, feature of CTI projects is the “screen pop”. When a user decides to accept an incoming phone call, typically the CTI adapter performs a search within the CRM system (we are assuming salesforce.com) using the incoming caller’s phone number (or other information depending on whether you are using an Interactive voice Response (IVR) system). If a match is found, the adapter will “pop” the appropriate Salesforce page showing the details of the record of the caller. Again, the objective here is to save time and allow your users to focus on fulfilling the needs of the caller. Instead of forcing a user to search for the caller’s information, in a good system the information simply appears at the appropriate time.
Third, any time a user is on a call, they can be prompted to take notes on that call which are automatically logged within the system as an Activity. Any related to the objects that the user has navigated to during the call can be automatically associated with that note. In my mind, this is a fantastic feature! It allows your organization to enforce specific behaviors across all of your users. This increases the value of your CRM system by providing confidence in the information being collected.
And lastly, but definitely the icing on the cake, everything I just mentioned happens from within your Salesforce system. No leaving the browser, no touching your phone, no toggling between a variety of programs on the desktop. Nice, huh?
What Are My Options?
So you’ve decided that you want the benefits that CTI can bring to your CRM solution, but don’t know how to do it? Well, there are basically two ways to enable CTI within your Salesforce deployment:
CTI Adapters
A CTI Adapter is a small piece of software that runs on the client machine and acts as an intermediary between the phone and salesforce.com. Whenever a call is routed to your phone, the adapter acts as the gateway to the softphone within Salesforce.com to alert the user and pop the appropriate screen. This action is reversed on the Click-to-Call functionality when a telephone number is clicked.
CTI Adapters are available via AppExchange for you to purchase direct from the vendors that have created them. The trick here is to determine which one you need. How do you do that? Well, just pick the adapter from the vendor who makes your phone system! If Avaya, you need one of the Avaya CTI adapters. If you use Cisco you are going to need to purchase a Cisco adapter. Makes sense, right? There are dozens of options available in AppExchange, so feel free to take a look. Some are free, most are not. But the nice thing is that each adapter is specific to the phone system it supports and all integrate with the salesforce.com softphone.
Open CTI
The second option available is Open CTI. Open CTI is a framework introduced by salesforce.com in the Summer ’12 release that allows “customers and partners to embed third party web apps directly into Salesforce”. This eliminates the need for an adapter running on the client machine and truly makes the CTI functionality a cloud sourced solution. It is a JavaScript based API that is designed to interact with web enabled telephony systems. What this means in practice is that Salesforce.com users will be able to have a user experience not unlike the Google Maps embedded within Yelp or various games that are embedded within Facebook. The point is the user is able to perform necessary work (or play) without any knowledge that a hand-off of sorts has occurred within the software/browser.
Which Option Should I Pick?
Well, that is going to be the topic of my next few posts. There are strengths and weaknesses to each option, and I would like to walk through them individually. First, I am going to walk through the installation and configuration of a CTI Adapter within salesforce.com and analyze the ease of its use, along with what I view as the positives and negatives. Finally, I’m going to spend a full post discussing the new Open CTI solution that was recently announced and what it means for salesforce.com’s vision of the future of CTI. Stay tuned!
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