CTI is dead. And that’s good news for CX.

For years, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) was sold as the gold standard for connecting contact centres to CRMs. Drop a widget into Salesforce, Dynamics, or whichever system your business relied on, and suddenly you could take calls inside your CRM. Praise be! It felt seamless and it felt efficient. And for a long time, it was even seen as innovative.

But that was then.

Today, CTI isn’t just outdated. It’s actively holding contact centres back. The widget approach made sense when voice was the only channel and CRM was the only data source that mattered. But today, when customer interactions span voice, chat, email, video, and AI-driven automation, and when data lives across multiple systems (not just CRM) CTI starts to look less like integration and more like a straitjacket.

The CTI illusion

On the surface, CTI feels neat. Agents stay in the CRM, and calls pop-up inside a tidy little window. Everyone’s happy, right?

No. Not really. Because CTI comes with some hard limitations that make it a poor foundation for modern CX:

• AI gets squeezed out.

  With CTI, the workspace is dictated by the CRM provider. That tiny widget doesn’t give the CCaaS provider’s AI the real estate to surface context, best actions, or rich insights. So, you’re paying for advanced AI and then choking it inside a letterbox.

• Feature lag is baked in.

  The widget is almost always a few steps behind. Want the latest CCaaS features? You’ll wait for the CRM vendor to catch up. And by then, your competitors are already live.

• Omnichannel doesn’t fit.

  Have you ever tried typing a detailed email response in a CTI widget? Or juggling chat, voice, and video streams in a space designed for call pop-ups? Omnichannel management simply doesn’t work in a shoebox.

• The single source of truth?

  CTI assumes CRM is the place where all data lives. But modern CX depends on multiple sources such as data lakes, ERPs, knowledge platforms, and eCommerce systems. If you’re stuck in a CRM-first integration, you’re blind to the bigger picture.

The real question: Why are we still doing this?

Many IT and CX leaders still see CTI as the “default” approach. It’s familiar and it feels safe. But in reality, it’s keeping your agents and your CX in the past. Today’s contact centres don’t need a widget bolted into a CRM. They need a workspace designed for better conversations, powered by data, and infused with AI.

IntegrationHub: CCaaS integration done right

This is where Acceleraate IntegrationHub for Zoom comes in. Instead of forcing Zoom Contact Center to squeeze into a CRM widget, IntegrationHub brings your critical systems into Zoom.

• Connect multiple data sources - CRM, ERP, knowledge bases, ecommerce, HR.

• Surface the right data in the Zoom agent desktop - in context, at the right time.

• Orchestrate workflows with AI - so routine tasks resolve automatically, and agents focus on outcomes.

No more letterbox view, no more feature lag, and no more single-point-of-truth assumptions. Just a modern, AI-powered CX workspace that actually makes your agents’ lives easier, and that they won’t need to reach for their reading glasses to get to grips with!

CTI had its moment.

But that moment’s over. If you’re still running your contact centre through a CTI widget, you’re locking yourself out of AI capabilities, limiting your agents, increasing handle times, and clinging to an integration model that was designed for yesterday’s problems.

The future of CX doesn’t fit in a box. And it definitely doesn’t fit in a widget.

It lives in platforms that are AI-first, omnichannel-ready, and open to all your data sources. That’s Zoom Contact Center, powered up by Acceleraate IntegrationHub.