Creating New Phone Ticket on Incoming Calls

It is possible to integrate OTRS with third-party computer telephony integration (CTI) solutions and make them work in unison. On as simple action as a click on a button in the CTI incoming call screen, the OTRS New Phone Ticket screen can be opened with the customer pre-selected by their phone number.

Note

This feature is only available to On-Premise customers. If you are a Managed customer, this feature is taken care of by the Customer Solutions Team in OTRS. Please contact us via support@otrs.com or in the OTRS Portal.

The only pre-requisite for the example below is that the used CTI software is able to open a link of a certain format in the web browser.

  1. First, edit the customer user configuration file and add the phone number field to CustomerUserSearchFields (in our case it is aptly named phone):

    CustomerUserSearchFields => [ 'login', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'customer_id', 'phone' ],
    

    See also

    For more information on how to provide custom user configuration please see the Customer User Back Ends chapter.

    Warning

    The customer user configuration is provided as an additional Perl module file. It is your responsibility to check the validity of the supplied file, since any syntax mistakes can lead to a broken system.

    Optionally, you can also add the phone field to CustomerUserListFields array, if you want to see the telephone number while searching for customer users:

    CustomerUserListFields => [ 'first_name', 'last_name', 'phone', 'email' ],
    
  2. Configure your CTI software to open the following link when you answer the phone:

    https://otrs.example.com/agent/ticket/create/phone?CustomerUserSearch=1&CustomerUserID=callernumber
    https://otrs.example.com/agent/ticket/create/phone?CustomerUserSearch=1&CustomerUserID=callerloginname
    

    For example, for customer user John Smith with login name johnsmith and telephone number 12345678:

    https://otrs.example.com/agent/ticket/create/phone?CustomerUserSearch=1&CustomerUserID=12345678
    https://otrs.example.com/agent/ticket/create/phone?CustomerUserSearch=1&CustomerUserID=johnsmith
    

    Where otrs.example.com is the FQDN of the OTRS system in question. Which exact value you use in the end (caller number or login name) depends on what your CTI software can construct the link with.

  3. When the ticket create screen is open in OTRS, a search will be conducted for the supplied value. In case only one customer user with that information is found, they will be pre-selected as the ticket customer user, and added to the related fields.

Note

In case you would like to do a search by the customer user email address, first make sure that the CustomerUserPostMasterSearchFields key of the customer user configuration is set to an appropriate field. Additionally, you must use an alternative URL query parameter called CustomerPostMasterSearch=1, since the email addresses use a different search mechanism. Finally, provide the email address for search as the CustomerUserID parameter, but you make sure to URL encode the value because it can contain some unsafe characters.

Note

Mechanism described above works for any of the following ticket create screens:

  • New Phone Ticket (default slug: /agent/ticket/create/phone)

  • New Email Ticket (default slug: /agent/ticket/create/email)

  • New SMS Ticket (default slug: /agent/ticket/create/sms)

  • New Process Ticket (default slug: /agent/ticket/create/process)

Considering the new process ticket screen consists of a more complex form, you must also provide a correct ProcessID parameter in order for the process to be pre-selected. For example:

https://otrs.example.com/agent/ticket/create/process?ProcessID=Process-9690ae9ae455d8614d570149b8ab1199&CustomerUserSearch=1&CustomerUserID=12345678
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