Open CTI Roadmap Session at Dreamforce
At Dreamforce Vincent Pham presented the Open CTI Roadmap session. The session also included how Salesforce customer JYSK was using CTI with Service Cloud for their global customer service team.
The session started with some of the highlights from the Winter ’18 release including the end of life for desktop CTI, Open CTI method parity for Lightning, and click-to-dial support for Lightning Components. I am very excited about the click-to-dial support for Lightning Components because it enables the ability to click-to-call from custom Lightning Pages and Components. Visualforce Pages have had this capability for quite some time, so it’s nice to that Lightning Components are up to speed.
That said, I was a bit disappointed to learn that click-to-dial isn’t supported in Lightning Components that are embedded in external apps via an iframe. The most common use case here is clicking-to-call from the Lightning for Outlook/Gmail side panel or another Lightning Out application.
The "greyed-out" features above are the ones not available in Lightning (i.e. mostly the advanced capabilities)
When it comes to CTI in the Lightning Experience it can handle all basic capabilities, but still needs improvement to support some of the more advanced functionality. It was great to hear that the Salesforce team is working hard on these items!
I found the most exciting item in the CTI Roadmap session the ability to screen pop to a Lightning Flow! You can configure this setting in the softphone layout. The softphone layout is one of most misunderstood features of CTI in Salesforce. This is because many CTI vendors build in their own search and screen pop capabilities. You will want to turn off those capabilities from your vendor and use the native softphone layout settings to take advantage of popping to a Lightning Flow.
On a side note, Lightning Flow had a major presence in multiple keynotes at Dreamforce. Basically, it’s Visual Flow embedded in the Lightning Experience, except instead of multiple page screens it is housed in a single responsive component, which can still have multiple flow steps.
Stay tuned at Salesforce delivers most of the advance CTI features for Lightning!
This post originally appeared as part of my Dreamforce Service cloud recap here.
