Hello all, I am the Customer Systems Architect at Hampshire County Council. I specialise in integrating web, email, chat and phone interactions into SAP systems and those of other vendors.
In this blog post I will explain how we dealt with posting CTI screen pops to the SAP Service Cloud CTI Client Adapter whilst maintaining a good agent experience and without CTI product customization.
Problems with CTI integration and SAP CTI Adapter
Unless your CTI vendor has a built-in integration to SAP Service Cloud, or supports Widget integration, generally vendors talk in terms of CRM integration using “Screen Pops”.
A Screen Pop will usually involve the CTI passing a parametrized URL to Windows so that it will pop a new tab in a browser-based CRM.
This type of approach has two issues when configured to SAP Service Cloud CTI:
If using the CTI adapter
It may result in a new browser tab opening as below, which is not a good agent experience as they then must close the window
Screen Pop
If using Deep Linking
As described in other blog posts a deep link can be used to pop various objects in C4C, however using this process for CTI has two disadvantages compared to using the Adapter:
· Is slow to load pages – around 10 seconds
· Bypasses the Live Activity Center which is the standard way to handle phone calls
Solution using Custom Protocol in Windows
If you want to use the CTI Adapter and experience this issue, this is a possible solution which worked with our Skype for Business CTI installation:
1. Create a new sapcti Custom Protocol
Custom protocols are used in Windows to launch applications such as Excel, Word etc from web links.
Use the following Registry entries to create a new custom protocol which instructs Windows to launch an intermediary application
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTsapcti]
@=”URL:sapcti Protocol”
“URL Protocol”=””
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTsapctishell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTsapctishellopen]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTsapctishellopencommand]
@=””C:\Program Files (x86)\CTI\CallC4C.exe” ”%1””
2. Modify the calls from CTI to use the new custom protocol instead of http
Modify the URL generated by CTI so instead of prefixing the calls with http:// prefix them with the new sapcti protocol. Example:
Replace
http://localhost:36729/?CID=BCM1234&ANI=03703133133
with
sapcti://localhost:36729/?CID=BCM1234&ANI=03703133133
3. Create a simple application to handle the custom protocol and call the CTI Adapter directly
In the above example the application is called CallC4C.exe and installed in
C:Program Files (x86)CTI
Sample .net Code
Sample Code
The configuration above will instruct Windows to pass URLs starting with sapcti:// to the CallC4C.exe application which will call the CTI Adapter directly rather than by popping a new browser tab.
Conclusion
If you face this problem, you may find your CTI vendor proposes a custom development to fix the issue. With a few simple steps as above most standard CTI products can easily be connected to SAP Service Cloud.
