SAP for Utilities : Computer Telephony

Integration for SAP CRM

Posted by Krishnakumar Ramamoorthy Sep 29, 2012
This blog is a part of a series of blogs around SAP Industry Solution for Utilities. You can find the main blog
here. In this blog, I will provide a short overview of Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and it's relevance to
SAP CRM Interaction center. We will also discuss the 'out of the box' options that SAP provides to achieve CTI
as well as how we can adapt this integration to suit specific business requirements.
Before we proceed further, please read this fine print. All the views provided below are my personal opinion
and doesn't necessarily reflect my employer's. I work for my employer as a Netweaver Integration consultant
with a focus in Utilities Industry but every customer's requirement is unique and you should definitely seek
for professional opinion before making your business decisions. Treat the inputs in this blog series as just
opinions, nothing more, nothing less.
Customer call center is one of the key components of an utility's business. Call center agents handle various
customer queries ranging from emergency situations like gas leaks, outage reports to regular queries like
payment information. A customer's interaction with the call center could be through multiple channels like
Phone, Chat, Email etc., however for the purposes of this discussion let's consider phone channel. When
a customer places a phone call to the utility's customer service, usually the call hits the 'Interactive Voice
Response' (IVR) system first (Usually IVR is a component within a suite of products called Call Center
applications). The idea is to answer as many customer's queries as possible without the involvement of a
call center agent. This integration is a system to system integration where the IVR system integrates with the
back end customer system (in our case the SAP IS-U system) to get the required data and respond to the
customer's queries.
However, in some instances (like gas leak emergency, questions about the bill or if you had a name and an
accent like mine where the IVR system can't seem to understand your query), the customer may want to speak
to a 'real' human being a.k.a the customer service agent. When such an option is chosen by the customer,
the call is diverted to an "available" customer service agent. While doing so, the call center application will
also forward the customer details like Customer Account Number, Phone number from where the call is being
placed, nature of the query etc so that the customer service agent has enough information about the customer
and his/her call even before accepting the customer's call. This is where, a term called 'Screen Pop' is used,
which means, when a call is forwarded to the customer service agent, through the help of system to system
integration between the call center application and the customer information system, the customer record is
automatically fetched and pushed to the desktop screen of the call center agent even before they are put on
line with the customer. This not only reduces the call wait time for the customer but also improves the customer
interaction experience. So, how do we achieve this feature in SAP CRM Interaction center?
SAP provides a server to server integration framework called as 'Integrated Communication Interface (ICI)'.
ICI interface is a part of Netweaver and provides a webservices layer (SOAP/XML) for enabling system to
system integration between Call center applications (like Genesys, Cisco, Aspect, SAP BCM etc) and SAP
business suite applications like SAP CRM. The ICI framework is documented very well and is available as a
part of SAP Integration and Certification center here. Through ICC, SAP provides a way for partners to certify
their products for integration with SAP Business suite appliations through the ICI. Most well known telephony
vendors have SAP certified CTI integration adapters for integration with SAP CRM and I would suggest that
you work with your telephony vendor on this. I have also seen many folks in the forums asking if they should
build this integration from scratch. Though technically it is possible, the development is quite extensive and has
to be done on both SAP business suite and call center application. Considering different skillset reqruirements,
development, testing and maintanence effort, buying an out of the box adapter for this integration may be a

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better choice than building it from scratch. Again, as stated above, every customer's requirement is unique, so I
leave it you to chose the option that is best suited for your landscape.
You will also hear a term called as SAP Business Communication Broker (BCB) which is a set of
ABAP APIs provided by SAP for utilizing the ICI interface within the Business suite applications. In
other words, ICI is the technical layer that deals with the integration with the contact center application
through HTTP(S) & SOAP/XML whereas the BCB is an internal API that abstracts the ICI interface
for easy integration with Business Suite applications. This is better explained by the logical diagram
as shown below (I conveniently leveraged the diagram from SAP documentation available here.

So, let us assume that you purchased a SAP certfied ICI adapter through your telephone vendor.To make this
integration work out of the box, there is some configuration required both on the call center application/adapter
side as well as on the SAP business suite applicaiton like SAP CRM. The configuration on the adapter side
varies from vendor to vendor, so I suggest you work with your vendor on this. On the SAP side, there are some
simple configuraiton steps and details are documented in this article. Though this article is about configuration
the integration with SAP BCM and SAP CRM, the steps on the SAP CRM side is the same, irrespective of the
adapter used. There is also a very well documented Wiki page for SAP Interaction center, available here, that
details some of the nuances of CTI integration and configuration options.

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After reading through the extensive ICI documentation, you may have realized that there is a tight coupling
between the SAP CRM applicaiton and the CTI adapter. In all cases, the integration is acitivated once a
call center agent logs on the SAP CRM system. When the call center agent logs on, they also log on to the
contact center application/CTI adapter through the ICI interface webservice calls. This webservice call tells
the contact center/CTI adapter that a particular user with a certain work center ID is logged on to SAP CRM. It
also provides the CTI adapter with a call back URL that ties back to the SAP CRM user session for back and
forth communication between the CTI adapter and SAP CRM. Once this connection session is established,
data between SAP CRM and the CTI adapter is exchanged using 'Call Attached Data (CAD)' which is an
encoded XML payload. It is through CAD, the SAP CRM system is able to send the CTI adapter, the customer
service agent's work center details and the CTI adapter is able to send the customer information like customer
account number, reason for call etc. More information is available in section 4.3.3 of the ICI documentation that
I referred above. I also leveraged the high level sample process flow diagram and the CAD XML structure from
the ICI documentation for easy corelation, below

In most cases, the out of the box integration meets the business requirements. But in certain cases, within
SAP CRM, you may want to access the call attached data to determine further course of action. Or based on
certain call center agent's actions, you may want to change the CAD to send additional data to the CTI adapter/
Call center application. I have faced such requirements in the past and hence thought will share my experience
here.
In this example, when a call was received from the customer and diverted to a call center agent, the
requirement was for the call center agent to collect certain vital information from the customer and send it
back to the CTI adapter/Call center application using the call attached data (CAD). Provided below is how we
achieved this requirement within SAP CRM using some ABAP coding
Step 1: Get a reference to the Contact Center Session
data: lr_ccs type ref to cl_iccmp_ccs. lr_ccs ?= cl_iccmp_ccs=>get_instance( ).
Step 2: Get the current phone ID. We do this to make sure that the CSR is in an active call with the customer.
If lv_phonid is initial, you cannot proceed further
data: lv_phoneid type string. lv_phoneid = lr_ccs->get_currentphoneid( ).
Step 3: Get the contact record
data: lr_contact type ref to cl_crm_ic_mcm_contact. lr_contact ?= lr_ccs->get_contact( lv_phoneid ).

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Step 4: Get the contact record unique ID so that we can read the contact attached data
data: lv_id type string. lv_id = lr_contact->if_crm_ic_contact~m_id.
Step 5: Get the contact attached data which is a XML String
data: lv_iad type string. lv_iad = cl_crm_ic_mcm_session_proxy=>get_iad( lv_id ).
Step 6: Change the contact attached data with the information that was collected from the customer. Since
lv_iad is encoded XML, you should be able to use the CL_IXML classes to parse the XML, append the new
nodes as agreed with the CTI adapter/Contact Center application and render the XML. I haven't provided the
sample code for the update_cad method because there is a lot of documentation available in this site for XML
manipulation in ABAP using CL_IXML calsses
update_cad( exporting in_iad = lv_iad importing out_iad = changed_iad ).
Step 7: Update the changed contact data information in the Contact Center Session
data: lv_result type boolean. lv_result = cl_crm_ic_mcm_session_proxy=>set_iad( iv_itemid = lv_id iv_iad = changed_iad ).
Step 8: Trigger that 'Item Attached Data Updated' event so that the updated Contact attached data is sent to
the CTI Adapter/Contact Center
cl_crm_ic_mcm_session_proxy=>do_triggeriadupdated( lv_id ).
SummaryHopefully this weblog was useful in understanding the Computer Telephony Integration options
available within SAP CRM and also provided enough information on how you can access the call attached
data and maniputlate it for specific business requirements. As always, I will very happy to hear your
comments and feedback. 14195 Views Tags: sapmentor, abap, utilities, is-u, integration, crm_integration,
customer_relationship_management, cti, ici, bcb, sap_business_suite_

Rajwin Singh Sood

May 31, 2016 11:47 AM
its really good But I have a scenario wherein I need to replace CRM IC with FIORI in other words I need to
integrate ICI with FIORI complete out of box solution. I am trying to figure out the ICI web service which I can
check and try to consume in FIORI. Please let me know in case you have some documentation on the same.
You can forward me at rajwin.sood@mindtree.com. Your help will be highly appreciated.
ralf hakspiel
Feb 3, 2016 9:30 AM
I do have a question concerning quote: "But in certain cases, within SAP CRM, you may want to access the
call attached data to determine further course of action"
In your examples see above we just talk about sendung attached data from CRM to CMS.
What about the other way around?
How can I have access in CRM on the attached data being sent from CMS?
THX
Ralf
Aimee Stinson
Dec 21, 2013 12:02 AM
Hi,

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Can you point me to technical documentation for building CTI integration to SAP CRM on HANA?
Thank you!
Krishnakumar Ramamoorthy in response to Anu Venkat on page 5
Nov 25, 2013 5:11 PM
Anu
I suggest that you post this question in the forums where you will get a broader audience to answer. The
question you have asked above is more about how to develop integration using webservices exposed by
SAP. Many connectors have been developed are available in the market which does just that and integrating
systems using webservices is fairly a common skill/technique.
Anu Venkat
Nov 21, 2013 10:31 AM
Hi Krishna
Thank you for the detailed information. Can the SAP CRM be connected to Avaya AES directly without any
connectors( I know its not possible)? But One of my colleague from SAP development is trying to connect
to the AES through the RFC Destination Avaya AES. We always get ICM_http_connection_failed? In which
location the detailed logs of the connection failure will be posted? Please assist?
I can share the screenshot if required
Krishnakumar Ramamoorthy in response to Anu Venkat on page 5
Nov 18, 2013 4:25 PM
Anu
Thanks for your comments. The documentation for the webservice is available in the integration certification
center, the link for which I have provided in the blog above. I will also provide it here for ease of access http://
scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7783.
Most of the development for this will be done in the telephony software. Depending on your use case, there
may be a lot of development involved.
Thanks
Anu Venkat
Nov 18, 2013 8:29 AM
Hi Krishna
Your blog is very useful for the people who are new to SAP CRM integration with CTI. Can you please provide
more details on the framework you mentioned? I am completely new to SAP CRM and have good working
experience on IVR and to an extent in CTI. We wanted to integrate the AES with SAP CRM without using any
connectors. I believe this is possible as per the statement in your blog. Can you please assist more on this?
Can you please share the WSDL file you are talking about? Can you give some reference documents for the
same..
Arun Iyer in response to Krishnakumar Ramamoorthy on page 6
Oct 11, 2012 7:36 PM

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Hi Krishna,
I can tell you two/three glaring bugs with set_cms_data.
1. You cannot update cad for more than one applications ids using this method. This is due a bug on line no 33
where lv_xml_string is being over written within the loop.
2. At the end SAP is calling lv_set_result = lo_contact->set_iad( ). Wihtin set_iad they are adding applicaton
id CRM_IC/MCM with FWDTYPE as current call state and FWDPREHANDLE as current interaction id. This
works well for as long as the call is not a transferred one. Doing this on a transferred call overwrites FWDTYPE
from Transfer to space and FWDPREHANDLE from previous interaction id to current interaction id. This
corrupts the contact state for the agent, any subsequent change in state impacts the communication context
area. The context area then just freezes and does not refreshes.
3. This method puts a space limitation on the application id and cad data item name passed from CCS to SAP.
This is a small issue nevertheless is one.
Cheers,
Arun
Krishnakumar Ramamoorthy in response to Astrid Gambill on page 6
Oct 11, 2012 6:01 PM
Thanks. Good to know this blog was of value to your team
KK
Astrid Gambill
Oct 11, 2012 5:21 PM
I forwarded this blog to a colleague running our VOIP project and his response was "Wow, great article".
Thanks for sharing your expert knowledge.
Krishnakumar Ramamoorthy in response to Arun Iyer on page 6
Oct 10, 2012 6:13 PM
Arun
Thanks for your comments and glad you found this blog useful. It took some debugging to figure out
these classes as there is no clear documentation. I would have thought CL_IC_CAD_DATA_PROCESS
should work too. I didn't use it because it, the SET_CMS_DATA code uses string manipulation of XML
and though it works, it's not elegant enough :-). So I restored to using my own XML manipulation in the
CL_CRM_IC_MCM_SESSION_PROXY, SET_CMS_DATA method basically recreates the XML for every item
in the CAD_LIST which is also not elegant, performance wise.
Let me know how the CL_CRM_IC_MCM_SESSION_PROXY works for you.
Cheers
KK
Arun Iyer
Oct 6, 2012 2:27 PM
Hi Krishnakumar,

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This is a super blog that I chanced upon. We have extensive requirements to update cad from SAP to our
contact centre which is GPlus. I have tried using CL_IC_CAD_DATA_PROCESS->SET_CMS_DATA and
cl_crm_ic_mcm_contact->set_iad but both are useless. Both update cad but along with updating
GENESYS-CAD, they also update crm_ic/mcm which jeopardisess my contact state FWDTYPE
and FWDPREHANDLE. I was very nervous for the last couple of days wheher i should directly use
cl_crm_ic_mcm_session_proxy=>set_iad. Standard SAP for updating CAD in the CAD workcentre is still using
CL_IC_CAD_DATA_PROCESS->SET_CMS_DATA which according to me completely wrong. Why don't they
release any oss note correcting the same.
BTW - Thanks so much for this blog.
Cheers,
Arun

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