What is Computer Telephony Integration & Why It Is Important?

Senior Writer: Priya Naha

Published : November 22, 2017

Summary: Computer telephony integration is an essential asset to contact centers that improve business communication. It enhances agents’ productivity, customer satisfaction, and external communication. This blog discusses computer telephony integration, its usage, and its importance for businesses. 

Remote work tools like video conferencing, chat messaging, and task management platforms boost big and small businesses’ internal communication.

However, improving external communication for better customer relationship management remains a challenge.

This is where computer telephony integration has its say!

This blog will discuss computer telephony integration software and why it is essential for businesses.

Let’s find out.

What is Computer Telephony Integration?

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) is a technology that enables a computer to interact with a phone system. A user can call directly from their desktop sans a PBX or key system telephone. CTI integration links call centers’ telephone systems to their business application so that their business software can have more call control over the management.

This cloud based telephony integration software gives a centralized control system over different types of communication such as phone, computer, fax, voicemail, or mobile, allowing communication among these devices through a single interface.

CTI opens doors to a more flexible and scalable communication system for companies, especially those that need to handle calls every day but suffer mainly because of costly business applications and communication infrastructures.

Therefore, CTI was introduced as a platform between customers and agents to improve agent performance and customer satisfaction without incurring huge calling charges.

Moreover, agents can also track the customer history with your business to reduce the time of customer interactions and encourage better customer service.

Reports suggest that the computer telephony integration market will witness astonishing growth by 2030!

How does CTI Work?

With a CTI telephony capability, your cloud based call center software can enable multiple features to help your organization improve team performance and boost efficiency through a unified dashboard and manage CTI integration better.

The advanced features of CTI technology make the contact centers’ agent’s job easier while providing fantastic customer experiences and improving business systems workforce management. Some important features of CTI software include:

Features of Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)

Interactive Voice Response

With interactive voice response IVR, callers can navigate a pre-set multi-level voice-based automatic call menu for call forwarding or self service options resolution using the automatic call distribution feature (ACD) to the right agent or customer’s preferred channel.

Phone Controls

CTI phone allows the contact center workforce to use computer telephony for inbound and outbound calls enabling them to transfer calls, answer incoming calls, terminate calls, and put callers on hold.

Agent Supervisor Tools

With CTI software, supervisors can provide direct assistance to agents by enabling call monitoring tools. CTI solutions help supervisors to use their computers for call whispering or take over a live call.

Skills Based Routing

In skills based routing, agents are assigned phone calls based on their skills and knowledge base. With a more logical approach to call routing, agents can handle calls within their expertise, leading to better call handle time, call resolution, and agent performance.

Call Controls 

With computer telephony integration CTI, you can enable advanced call management options like call screening, call forwarding, and caller id.

Predictive Dialers

Instead of manual dialing and cold calling, CTI computer solutions allow the contact center business phone system to auto-dial phone numbers. Then, predictive dialers connect the call to support agents when a live person answers, resulting in satisfied and happy customers.

Importance of CTI for businesses

Cost-effective

Adopting computer telephony integration products for your call center is less costly, more flexible, and offers a better customer experience.

It scales more than the traditional methods system of a key telephone system, which was costly to purchase and required constant maintenance. Moreover, those conventional systems could not be operated from remote locations.

Whereas in the case of the CTI system, the executive’s only tool is a computer. With the CTI solution, the executives can even work from any remote location, liberating them to work for longer hours in different time zones without delocalizing. Such flexibility in the working system is possible since all CTI takes to run installing a program on the computer, thereby making the entire process pocket-friendly.

Quick and Easy Installation

Unlike conventional methods of a telephone system, Computer Telephony Integration is a much more flexible system, which is run through the simple installation of the program on the computer. CTI enables the representatives to operate and answer from remote locations. With easy installation, various other benefits are associated, like call recording, historical reporting, transferring the calls to other departments, and conferencing.

Real-Time Business Intelligence

CTI systems allow agents to fetch all the data collected about the routed client in one place. For this, contact and client base are imported into the executive’s computer and synced up with client profiles. This unified dashboard screen pops the complete synced-up information on the system when the client calls. Thus, it eliminates the logistics of juggling forth and back with different programs and helps the representative concentrate on the task. In fact, this log keeps a detailed account of every call, including the call history, the issues raised by the customer in the past, the representative’s information, and their recorded audio of previous calls.

Easily Make and Receive Calls

Computer telephony integration allows the representatives to instantly answer or click to dial the number flashing on the screen with just a single click instead of tapping the buttons each time to place a call. Also, as the complete detail gets flashed on the screen, the agents can talk with utmost confidence and respond fittingly to the queries as per the past experiences of other executives.

Enhanced Team Collaboration 

One of the crucial features of CTI is that the calls are transferable to other departments. In fact, managers can join the call if the representative cannot solve the issue. Moreover, with other types of features, including call forwarding, call recording, status reports, and real-time analytics, a better understanding can be established among the departments as they can easily find out to which department it was earlier transferred and solutions provided by the representative for the same.

Increased Productivity

Through such CRM integrations, managers can evaluate the agents’ productivity using real time data. For instance, the number of calls you hang up, answer, put on hold, or keep on waiting, can be channelized after analysis of the calls to improve their response rate. The managers can also join the call, track time based routing, or listen to the call recordings between agents and customers. This improves the agent’s productivity and also enhances customer satisfaction.

Data Monitoring

By now, you must have already understood how beneficial computer telephony integration is for customers and representatives. But do you know that this integration is of utmost importance for the supervisor as it provides call monitoring, call recording, and real time analytics, which make their jobs easier?

In fact, managers can also:

1. a) Analyze the agent’s performance during an ongoing call.
2. b) Monitor the support teams’ performance over a variable time.
3. c) Survey customer satisfaction through user habits.
4. d) Find the areas that need improvement by tracking the number of dropped or missed calls, waiting time, and other applications.
5. e) Offer real time assistance in case the representatives are struggling.
6. f) Assign the tasks as per the capability of the executive.

Features that Enhance Caller Experience

Cloud phone systems offer multiple features that are otherwise difficult to implement using the traditional system, but CTI center software has caught momentum and ensures increased productivity.

CTI also boosts caller experience in a lot of ways, such as:

1. a) With On hold music, the customers don’t have to listen to monotonous beeps; instead, they can enjoy the peppy numbers or listen to the company’s messages, depending on the business. This reduces the chances of call drops and makes call waiting bearable.
2. b) Using the IVR system, you can give access to your customers to choose the relevant department they want to reach for their specific queries. For example, if the necessity is for sales calls, the customer can connect with the sales department.
3. c) Features like click-to-call save time dialing the number every time, as you can place the call by simply clicking on the screen.
4. d)As the complete customer data is displayed in front of the executive’s screen, they can greet the customer with their name, giving a personalized touch to their conversation.
5. e)Fetching customer data has another benefit. It saves the caller time in answering and explaining the previous conversations with other representatives.

All these points justify that computer telephony integration is the need of the hour for every business, irrespective of its size and industry. It has a greater insight into the company and its agents, customers, and managers by establishing multiple communication channels that strengthen their relationship with each other.

Now that you have understood the importance and common functions of CTI let’s get acquainted with the types of computer telephony integrations. You can then decide on the most suitable integration services per your business needs.

Types of Computer Telephony Integration

Pipedrive Integration

Using CallHippo’s extension for Pipedrive integration, you can easily make and receive calls in less time, record the call and listen to each conversation and access the call flow logs from Pipedrive CRM. Pipedrive Integrations’ other features include tracking the deals, planning the activities, efficiently managing the deals, and working smarter through organized sales. This managed integration prevents the businesses from engaging in any cumbersome tasks that hamper or mislead the sales in any case, thus, boosting the performance and building the brand’s credibility.

Zoho Integration

Zoho CRM integrations improve your competence and productivity with easy collaboration while working with sales leads, prospects, and customers. CallHippo and Zoho integration benefits the overall communication system with clients and brings efficiency to the work of sales executives, gives a personalized user interface to the customers, and allows automatic synchronization between Zoho and CallHippo.

Freshdesk Integration

One of the easiest support systems that let you make and receive calls instantly from Freshdesk Panel, along with the number of other features that are provided to boost the performance of your sales executives.

This integration of CallHippo and Freshdesk helps you to:

1. a) View the ticket reports on the dashboard.
2. b) Listen to the call recording and analyze them. It is one of the ways to also keep a tab on the agent’s performance.
3. c) This Freshdesk integration enables you to add comments or status notes with each call to avoid later confusion regarding the status of the generated support tickets.

Zendesk Integration

When you collectively see the features of Zendesk integration, you realize that it liberates you from the painstaking task of handling the details of each call. It is particularly beneficial for businesses that handle a large number of calls and is required to maintain their customers’ complete data for future use. In this integration, you can easily make and receive calls from your computer screen by simply dialing the number in the opened ticket from Zendesk. All the calls also get recorded, which can be listened to at any time from Zendesk itself.

Intercom Integration

Upon integrating your system with Intercom support services, you can readily make use of features such as live chat for sales, send targeted messages to onboard users, and, most importantly, solve customer problems faster by knowing about who you’re talking to and seeing their location, activity and so much more. You can even get real time updates to see what’s going on at the current moment, loop in your teammates using notes and mentions to get the solution to a challenging question put up by the client, or even see the latest conversations with the users.

Recommended Read : 9 Reasons CRM Phone Integration Improves Customer Experience

Conclusion: Computer telephony integration is one of the most efficient technologies to use these days. As a tech-savvy business, you must integrate your calling services with cloud telephony systems to move to a system where you incur minimal calling costs and provide a free flow of communication between the agent and customers while also helping the supervisor to monitor the productivity of the business. This real time data based integration must become a part of every business today for it to fetch the prospective clients’ towards you, thus expanding your business scope!

Frequently Asked Questions 

Which industries benefit the most from Computer Telephony Integration?

Telemarketers and retailers benefit the most from computer telephony integration. Some other sectors where the CTI center operations take place include:

1. Financial
2. Consulting
3. Software development
4. Healthcare
5. Hospitality management

What is the future of CTI?

Better mobile experience is one of the primary focuses of CTI vendors presently. The future will see built-in mobile accessibility across multiple communication platforms. In addition, better social media platform integrations will also be an improvement scope for any CTI vendor.

How do I determine the cost-effectiveness of CTI? 

Computer Telephony Integration creates revenue and saves an organization’s money by:

• Increasing employee satisfaction and offering employee flexibility, thereby reducing employee turnover.
• Enhancing customer satisfaction by increasing repeat purchases and decreasing client loss.
• Improving training, better identifying and ameliorating recurring problems.
• Optimizing the workforce by making more sales calls using dialer modes and spending less time on manual data entry, phone controls, and call management.

Updated : November 18, 2024

Priya Naha

Priya Naha is an experienced technical content writer who focuses on VoIP and telephony technologies.  Her expertise in telecommunication and content marketing allows her to simplify complex topics with real-world knowledge, making her writing relatable, informative, and easy-to-read.  Her direct involvement with VoIP products and solutions makes her a reliable voice in the field.

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