Click and dial phone systems | Telephone systems

Click and Dial

People often ask us to make their database “Pop” a client record when they phone in, or mail a call when they press the dial button. Of course we can do this, but it is a collaborative effort between the phone system and the database.

TAPI – Telephone Application Programming Interface was developed by Microsoft so PCs running Windows could interact with a phone system. The concept is simple:

Microsoft wrote the TAPI standard and enabled windows support.

The phone system manufactures make the phone system send out and receive TAPI events when the phone system does specific things or it told to do those things.

The PC software writers pick-up those TAPI events and make their program respond to and originate them.

URL link – Some phone systems notably those from SpliceCom can pass and receive URLs (web page requests containing phone information) so the database sees a page request coming from the agent who’s phone is ringing and respond by presenting the page with the callers details.

What do you need to define?

For a successful integration between phone system and database you need to defined for your office:

Which PCs need to pop on inbound calls?
How many numbers are you storing against a client?
What screen pops when a match with an incoming call is found?
Is the same screen for sales as accounts?
Should the database remember the number and add it to the customer record, when a match wasn't found?
Should the database pop a select from list screen, when the number is found in more than one record?

At this point as well as giving the agent the customer screen, your database should log against the customer file that this conversation happened with Agent X, date, time and duration. Your database should automatically log every customer every interaction - phone call, email, fax, letter, what changes were made & with by which agent. This should be searchable by customer, agent or change.

If you are recording calls then this information is required when you need to find the recording later.

Some off the shelf programs support this two way TAPI control, the more common is just the “Click and Dial” as found in Outlook. There are 3^rd party ways to make Outlook contacts "Pop" with incomming calls.