CTI Solutions Inc. CTI Software Solution and CTI Vendor Knowledgebase
CTI Solutions: Computer Telephony for CTI Software Vendors and Customers
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Welcome to our CTI software knowledgebase page. CTI Solutions Inc. is a market leader in the development of CTI software for computer telephony integration (CTI). Our landing page serves as a small knowledge base of information to educate owners of IP phone systems about CTI software and other CTI connector applications. If you are interested in contributing to this page, we would happily accept your blog postings. We would love to have some CTI Vendors post a few stories as well. Call us.
CTI stands for Computer Telephony Integration Software Solution
What is CTI? It’s a type of technology that enables computer and telephone systems to interact together, to build great telecom CTI applications. A CTI solution is a software service or application that can serve as your means to make your IP phone system more intelligent and useful. A CTI solution is considered by many to be a computer telephony solution. CTI is most commonly used by call centers handling a large number of incoming calls. Call centers implementing CTI software can use computers to manage all telephone calls, which in turn leads to increased efficiency and better results. PBX equipment such as Shoretel, Mitel, Avaya, and Cisco, all support add on applications to allow developers to produce CTI. Professional CTI Vendors specialize in building software to connect IP phones to applications. A computer telephony solution can be something as common an mundane as using Zoiper or EyeBeam to connect your headphone equipped computer to your SIP server.
If you are reading this post, it’s likely you’re considering CTI because your team is handling more calls than they can manage. The phones won’t stop ringing, and customers aren’t being helped quickly enough. Stress builds for employees, which consequently gets felt by the customer. CTI can change that.
What is Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)?
Computer Telephony Integration software or CTI software is a term that is used to describe the means of connecting your phone system together with your computer systems. In 2020, that often takes the form of a Software As A Service (SAAS) that runs in the so called cloud. It is very rare for modern CTI to be hosted on premise. The advantage of SAAS is that allows you to offload the burden of hosting servers and software in your own datacenter. Instead, you host it on the vendor's equipment and they pay for the equipment and facilities. Your typical CTI software will include a contact management system, and agent dialer, and intelligent call routing. It enables you to do a wide range of things that will improve sales and service including:
Identifying and routing incoming calls to the right person or department
Logging, recording and storing calls for quality assurance and compliance
Offering screen pops to your agents with information about the caller, their account, open cases or call history
Embedding a soft phone dial pad into your CRM interface so that calls can be made using VoIP (voice over internet protocol) or traditional PSTN (public switched telephone network)
Enabling agents to click-to-dial or auto-dial contacts
Monitoring and measuring key performance indicators like average handle time, first-call resolution, dropped call percentages and more.
Voicemail to email. See our blog entry on how to do this with shoretel shoretel SMTP
TAPI is one of the most common CTI software services
CTI Vendors license, sell, and maintain CTI software
The alternative to SAAS often takes the form of outmoded and fickle minded TAPI applications
Computer Telephony Integration Software
Some of the best examples of CTI software are products made by RingCentral, 8x8, Five9, TalkDesk, ChaseData, GeneSys, Dialpad, and NextTiva. At CTI Solutions, our favourite CTI software suite is Twilio. With Twilio Flex, you get a fully programmable API that can be turned into a custom could based contact call center platform. Playing with Twilio via their free developer platform is completely free to the developer. Twilio Flex Pricing. See their Getting Started page. There are lots of feee software libraries on Github to get started with.
Computer Telephony Solutions
The best CTI solution will improve call center agent interactions and integrate CRM data with your telephone system. Furthermore, the best solution will likely fit into a modest budget, and can be achieved in a reasonable time frame. Ideally the best of breed CTI software will offer features such as company-wide private chat, customer chat, presence detection, call recording, interactive voice response, touch tone digit question and answer to direct calls to the appropriate agents. The best solution will do all of that at an annual cost that does not destroy operating budgets. Ideally, there should be a way to get free cti software to try before you buy.
Design and Build Your Own Computer Telephony Integration software
Someday you may decide that the out of the box CTI software is too restrictive or you will find that the long term cost is really too much to pay. There are many services that can provide the underlying infrastructure such as SMS, Voice, Trunking and Phone numbers. Some examples find examples are Twilio and Plivo. Both offer trunking, SMS, and US based phone numbers
Free CTI Software
Where can you get free cti software from? Fortunately for us, Twilio has a great github respository from which you can find many prebuilt examples in everything from Java, node.js, python and PHP. The Java Examples are a starting point for many developers. There are many more examples at github
Cisco SIP Firmware
Download these firmware packages and convert your old 79xx series phones to SIP
SCCP SIP 7940,7960 SIP
Getting Started With Asterisk Phone System
Immerse yourself completely in the cloud with Asterisk hosted on Amazon ECS Free Tier. Here's a great guide to building your first ECS Free Tier Asterisk
Free Shoretel CTI Trial Licences
These are free demo licenses that you can use to get started. This is our own collection of free CTI software. Consider hiring a professional to build up your shoretel system.
AppDialer|5|Trial License| |0|3/5/2010 20:15:37|3/5/2010|4/19/2010| |0|1440|6YPNVZITDahDHTRFOPuvaw|1.0|TmclXLkD2FGV/cw4LrB/SsdETpAtDDnAQnoAUcimvwBmRmb3nGAdzQ==
Call Recorder|20|Trial License| |0|6/16/2010 18:56:22|6/16/2010|7/31/2010| |1|1440|ries3KFWJQsAuKpNfiN0PQ|1.0|FtTzsPeHnKcPn8cGdRM3kiWeXr9VsioloZs59Yt5Ku8QLJXS57bjJQ==
Web Dialer|10|Trial License| |0|1/27/2010 20:21:45|1/27/2010|3/13/2010| |0|14400|ahk2FZv3vD7YdkdChyHb6g|1.0|b9OC6o6iQVA5hN7iiEIqN9AJCj57OVLae8iMlDYa0gsAmDLd96ZAGw==
Workgroup Monitor|1|Trial License| |0|6/30/2010 22:17:01|6/30/2010|8/14/2010| |2|1440|eKikl40Qeeewk3pANVdoow|1.0|BDI5NNnl46bvlkUU6hAeNF+yiJGLTp42nvzWfxK1P2B5/imu0bUXUQ==
History and main CTI technologies
The origins of CTI software can be found in simple screen population (or "screen pop") technology. This allows data collected from the telephone systems to be used as input data to query databases with customer information and populate that data instantaneously in the customer service representative screen. The net effect is the agent already has the required screen on his/her terminal before speaking with the customer.
This technology started gaining widespread adoption in markets like North America and West European countries.
There were several standards which had a major impact in the ´normalization´ of in the industry, previously fully closed and proprietary to each PBX/ACD vendor. On the software level, the most adopted interface by vendors is the CSTA standard, which is approved by the standards body ITU. Other well known CTI standards in the industry are JTAPI, TSAPI and TAPI: JTAPI, the Java Telephony API is promoted by Sun; TSAPI, originally promoted by the AT&T (later Lucent then Avaya) and Novell; Microsoft pushed their own initiative also, and thus TAPI was born, with support mostly from Windows applications. All of these standards required the PBX vendor to write a specific driver, and initially support for this was slow.
Among the key players in this area, Lucent played a big role and IBM acquired ROLM Inc, a US pioneer in ACDs, in an attempt to normalize all major PBX vendor interfaces with its CallPath middleware. This attempt failed when it sold this company to Siemens AG and gradually divested in the area. A pioneer startup that combined the technologies of voice digitization, Token Ring networking, and time-division multiplexing was ZTEL of Wilmington, Massachusetts. ZTEL's computer-based voice and data network combined user-programmable voice call processing features, protocol conversion for automated "data call processing," database-driven directory and telset definitions, and custom LSI chipset technology. ZTEL ceased operation in 1986.
Two other important players were Digital Equipment Corporation and Tiger Software (now Mondago). Digital Equipment Corporation developed CT Connect which includes vendor abstraction middleware. CT Connect was then sold to Dialogic, which in turn was purchased by Intel. This CTI software, known as CT Connect, was most recently sold in 2005 to Envox Worldwide. Tiger Software produced the SmartServer suite which was primarily aimed at allowing CRM application vendors to add CTI functionality to their existing applications with minimal effort. Later, and after changing their name to Mondago, Tiger Software went on to produce the Go Connect server application, which is aimed at providing at helping other CTI vendors integrate with a wider range of telephone systems.
By 2008, most PBX vendors had aligned themselves behind one or two of the TAPI, CSTA or TSAPI standard. The TSAPI advocates were: Avaya, Telrad. The CSTA advocates were: Siemens (now Unify), Aastra, DeTeWe, Toshiba, Panasonic. The majority (see main TAPI article for detail) preferred TAPI. A few vendors promoted proprietary standards: Mitel, Broadsoft, Digium and most hosted platforms. CT Connect and Go Connect thus provided an important translation middle-layer, allowing the PBX to communicate in its preferred protocol, while an application can communicate using its preferred protocol.
Many of the early CTI vendors and developers have changed hands over the years. An example is Nabnasset, an Acton, Massachusetts firm that developed a CORBA based CTI solution for a client and then decided to make it into a general product. It merged with Quintus, a customer relationship management company, which went bankrupt and was purchased by Avaya Telecommunications. Smaller organisations have also survived from the early days and have leveraged their heritage to thrive. However, many of the 1980s startups that were inspired by the "Bell Breakup" and the coming competitive telephony marketplace, did not survive the decade.
On the hardware level, there was a paradigm shift since 1993, with emerging standards from IETF, which led to several new players like Dialogic, Brooktrout (now part of Dialogic), Natural MicroSystems (also now part of Dialogic) and Aculab offering telephony interfacing boards for various networks and elements.
Until 2011, it was the makers of telephone systems that implemented CTI solutions technologies such as TAPI and CSTA. But after this time, a wave of handsets become popular that were independently made. These handsets would connect to the telephone systems using standards such as SIP and consumers could easily buy their telephone system from one vendor and their handsets from another. However, this situation led to poor quality CTI since the protocols (ie SIP) were not really suitable for third-party control.
So, handset vendors started to add support for CTI directly. Initially this would be over proprietary HTTP methods, but in time uaCSTA (aka TR/87) became popular and by 2016 most SIP handsets support uaCSTA control. These include: Snom (the first to pioneer it), Yealink, Akuvox, Panasonic and Aastra.
CTI Solutions Website and Domain is us for Rent to Help Your Business
CTI Solutions Inc is all for promoting CTI on the web. Great News: CTI-SOLUTIONS.COM This domain is up for rent or lease. We have the best SEO potential around with our great website and memorable domain name. Even though our Alexa rating is quite shabby, We still have the domain name that you really want and need. I have the only CTI-Solutions .COM site in the world, no other TLD such as .BIZ, .INFO, .PL can beat that!
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interested: Call or text me at: (949)371-5079 or WeChat: MDMartin2
Rent the website only or forward the email info@cti-solutions.com (there is no email now)
don't email me at this address, there is no email server here
Complete Rental Rate: $120/month An A Record for @ and a CNAME for www pointed at your own Wordpres!
Backlink and Blog Entry Rate: $10/month or free if you will let us have a free one as well! Help us pay for a real wordpress website!
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Call us to get your business listed here, and add some of your content here too