Service or Help Desk CTI

Computer telephony integration (CTI) is technology that allows interactions between CTI enabled telephone systems and codeBeamer's web client. On an incoming phone call the CTI system starts a web browser with a codeBeamer Service Desk function URL. This function can be used as the single point of contact between users and IT Service Management.

This can be used for:

• Help Desk - manage, co-ordinate and resolve incidents as quickly as possible
• Service Desk - not only handles incidents, problems and questions but also provides an interface for other activities such as change requests, maintenance contracts, software licenses, Service Level Management, Configuration Management, Availability Management, Financial Management and IT Services Management.

Both centralized and distributed help/service center structures are supported:

• Central Service Desk - for organizations having multiple locations - reduces operational costs and improves usage of available resources
• Virtual Service Desk: for organizations having multi-country locations - can be situated and accessed from anywhere in the world due to advances in network performance and telecommunications, reducing operational costs and improving usage of available resources

Creating and Editing Issues using Incoming Phone Calls

The interface for CTI integration is:

http://<host>/cb/incomingCall.spr?phone=<phone no>

The country code is used to normalize phone numbers in the codebeamer database and to normalize the phone numbers of incoming calls, so that CodeBeamer can lookup matching user or customer accounts automatically (by phone number) when a call comes in. The phone number must be URL-encoded, in any user-readable format. To invoke this URL the currently logged-in user (Call center agent) needs account administration permission. If not logged in the login window will appear.

After the phone number is passed to codeBeamer the list of possible accounts corresponding to the phone number will be displayed. If more than one match is found, the agent consults the caller and chooses the appropriate account. If no matching-phone-number users are found, the agent can either choose to create a new account, or start an account search using different criteria (this works similarly to entering a filter in the System Admin -> Accounts screen). If a new account is created the phone number field is preset with the formatted phone number that was passed to codeBeamer.

After selecting an existing account or creating a new one, the account information will be displayed. The account details can be edited and issues associated with this account can be displayed, created or edited.

When opening a new issue for the caller, the agent can select the appropriate editable Tracker using a choice box. The Tracker dropdown list contains all trackers where the current user (call center agent) has permission to add new issues plus the permission to set the issue owner/supervisor. One dedicated default target tracker can be configured in general.xml via

<CTI enabled="true" defaultTrackerId="0" country="DE"/>

"Submitted by" refers to the agent, not the caller, when using this feature. The caller is the issue owner and the call center agent is the submitter.