One of the most commonly asked questions by SAP CRM Interaction Center customers is how to integrate computer telephony integration (CTI) software with the Interaction Center. Integrating your telephony system with your SAP CRM systems increases agent efficiency, usability, and accuracy while reducing average handling time. Instead of manually searching for a customer, CTI allows automatic customer lookup and identification (also known as "screen pop"). Computer telephony integration also provides other benefits such as the ability to use call-attached data (CAD) collected from an IVR system inside the Interaction Center. For example, CAD can be used to automatically retrieve and display a customer's sales order, service ticket, or other business transaction.

Note: CTI typically refers only to "telephony" integration. Therefore SAP uses the term communication management software (CMS) to refer more broadly to software that provides multi-channel communication including telephony, email, Web chat, etc. CTI is thus a subset of CMS.

The SAP CRM Interaction Center provides a toolset of agent-facing productivity tools to handle the business-facing or transactional aspects of a customer interaction. However it is important to note the Interaction Center does not include any underlying CTI capabilities such as BPX/ACD, IVR or telephone systems. Rather, these capabilities are provided by external contact-center infrastructure products - such as SAP BCM, Avaya, Cisco, Genesys, Siemens, and so on. However, SAP CRM does provide a certified interface with which to connect these external products to the Interaction Center for full integration. For more details, see my blog "What is Computer Telephony Integration (and Why Do I Need It?)" http://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/pub/wlg/7684.

Integrating external communication management software (CMS) with the SAP CRM Interaction Center requires two separate set of steps (and two different sets of resources). First, the external communication management software must be installed and configured by an expert who is familiar with the CMS product being used; this resource will usually not be an SAP expert. Next, the SAP CRM system must be configured. This set of steps involves IMG configuration, SAP menu activities, and a couple of SAP Notes. The person handling the SAP set up should be an SAP expert and need not be proficient with the particular CMS product being used.

Setting up the external CTI software

The set up and configuration of the external communication management software should be handled by an expert who is familiar with the product in question; this person will mostly likely not be an SAP resource. Most CMS vendors also have a professional services organization that can help install and deploy their software. In addition, there are many third-party systems integrators who have expertise installing particular CMS products.

For an example of the type of steps required to implement a CMS systems, you may want to take a look at the following article, "Configuring SAP BCM and SAP CRM Interaction Center" that focuses on the SAP Business Communications Management (BCM) communication management software product - which provides CTI and related multi-channel capabilities. Refer to section 2 of the article, "Set Up BCM" which focuses on the steps necessary to configure SAP BCM. You can find the article here: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/c0333e72-1183-2b10-e38e-831623459bb3;jsessionid=(J2EE3414700)ID0479755350DB10699010003940855301End.

Setting up SAP CRM

Once you have installed and configured the external CMS software, the next step is to set up the integration with the SAP CRM system. There are several steps involved:

1. Use transaction SM59 to define an RFC destination in the folder "HTTP Connections to External Server" that points to your CTI server.

2. In the IMG activity "Define Communication Management Software Profiles" enter an ID and description of your communication management software profile.

3. Assign the CMS function profile that you created in Step 2 to your desired CRM business role (formerly IC WebClient profile) in the IMG activity "Define Business Role".

4. Use transaction CRMM_BCB_ADM to create a new CMS system ID and to assign the RFC destination that you created in Step 1.

5. Use transaction CRMM_IC_MCM_CCADM to select the CMS software system ID that you created in Step 4. Choose the desired communication channel (e.g., telephony) and open the "Queues" folder and enter the ID of your CMS queue ID.

6. Use transaction CRMM_IC_MCM_CCLNK to assign the CMS profile that you created in Step 2 to the CMS connection that you created in Step 4.

Important SAP Notes

The following are a couple of very important SAP Notes that may need to be applied in order to enable CTI integration:

1337658          Ready/Not Ready radio button gray out and cannot be changed

1295006          Mandatory SICF services for IC WebClient