Computer Telephone Integration

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Contents
Computer Telephone Integration 2
Common functions 3
Forms of CTI 3
CTI application event flow 4

Computer Telephone Integration
Computer telephony integration (CTI) is technology that allows interactions on a telephone and a computer to be integrated or co-ordinated. As contact channels have expanded from voice to include:
- Eemail,
- Web, and
- Fax, the definition of CTI has expanded to include the integration of all customer contact channels (voice, email, web, fax, etc.) with computer systems.
The term convergence is usually applied to the integration of voice and data services on the same network, either in the enterprise or over public networks such as the Internet. CTI is the integration of telephony services with computers, servers, PBX devices, and other computer-related equipment. These two areas are merging as organizations install high-speed networks that can carry both voice and data.
Although the first implementations of CTI integrated computers with the circuit-switched voice phone network, new CTI products operate over IP data networks. A range of devices is possible, including:
• At the low end, a diskless device that integrates a Web browser and telephone functionality.
• At the high end, a desktop computer with telephone, videoconferencing, speech recognition, and just about anything else you might use in a telephony environment such as automatic answering, call forwarding, voice messaging, and so on.
IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is a CTI application. It is the front-end "computerized operator" that guides you through button-pushing options when you call a company (i.e., "press 1 for sales, press 2 for service"). Putting this on computers has simplified setup for ...