Salesforce Call Center

Important Open CTI is in maintenance mode and is scheduled for retirement on February 28, 2028. No new features or enhancements are being added to Open CTI. Effective immediately, Open CTI is deprecated and unavailable for newly created Agentforce Service orgs. To ensure long-term compatibility and access to the latest innovations, we recommend migrating to Service Cloud Voice. For more information, see this Knowledge Article.

To enable your contact center users to take advantage of the latest phone channel innovations, Salesforce recommends that you modernize your experience by moving to Service Cloud Voice. Service Cloud Voice offers many of the Open CTI features that you love and more. Unlike Open CTI, Service Cloud Voice is natively integrated with Omni-Channel and Command Center for Service, providing a seamless experience for contact center reps and supervisors across all digital channels. See Get to Know Service Cloud Voice.

Note Keep in mind that the out-of-the-box Service app is a Salesforce Classic app and only supports Open CTI for Salesforce Classic. To make calls in Lightning Experience, use Open CTI for Lightning Experience in a Lightning Experience app, like our out-of-the-box Service Console app.

To set up a call center, work with a developer or partner to create a CTI implementation that uses the Open CTI API and works with your existing telephony system. Most call centers are created by installing an AppExchange package, then all you have to do is decide which users you want to access the call center.

After a call center is set up, call center users can make and receive calls with a softphone. Each softphone looks and behaves differently because each CTI implementation is unique. In the console and in Lightning Experience, softphones appear in a footer. In Salesforce Classic, softphones appear in the left sidebar of every Salesforce page.

The call center is all about customization. You can modify softphone layouts and assign specific layouts to selected user profiles. You can also add phone numbers to call center directories so your users all have access to key phone numbers. As your needs change, your call center can be customized and changed too. As an admin, some customization you can do yourself. However, you might want to work with your developers or partners to make functionality changes.