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Omni-Channel is the prerequisite that decides your timeline

Salesforce Voice cannot be set up until Omni-Channel is on, because Omni-Channel becomes the routing engine for calls. Whether you already run it is the biggest single factor in how long the migration takes.

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Omni-Channel first. Then Voice. That is the order Salesforce imposes, and it is the order that decides how long an Open CTI migration takes.

Why Voice needs Omni-Channel

Under Open CTI, routing lived with the telephony vendor. The vendor’s platform decided which agent got the call; Salesforce just popped the record when it arrived. Omni-Channel was optional, and plenty of Open CTI orgs never turned it on, because they never needed to.

Salesforce Voice with Partner Telephony, the replacement for Open CTI, moves routing inside Salesforce. Omni-Channel becomes the routing engine for calls: which service channel a call belongs to, which presence status means an agent can take one, which queue it waits in, how much work an agent can hold at once. Voice cannot be set up until Omni-Channel is enabled, because there is nothing else to route the call. Salesforce documents the dependency in Set Up Salesforce Voice with Partner Telephony, and the enablement steps in Enable and Configure Omni-Channel.

If you already use Omni-Channel

If Omni-Channel already routes your cases or chats, this step is a review rather than a build. The question is whether the routing design still makes sense once calls arrive through it. Calls are different work: they are synchronous, an agent can hold exactly one, and a call waiting in a queue is a customer listening to hold music. Capacity rules built for chat, where an agent can hold three, need rethinking. Presence statuses need one that means “on a call”. Queues need to reflect the phone lines, not just the case types. It is a few weeks of design and testing, not months.

If you have never switched it on

Then this step is a project in its own right, and it comes before everything else. Service channels, presence statuses, queues, routing configurations, capacity rules, the Omni-Channel utility in the console, and agent training on a way of working that is new to them. None of it is exotic, but none of it is quick either, and it all has to be finished and settled before the first Voice call is placed.

Plenty of Open CTI orgs are in this position, precisely because Open CTI never asked for any of it. If that is you, the honest timeline for the migration starts with Omni-Channel and adds the Voice work on top, which is why the when to start bands lean so heavily on whether it is already on.

The flows come with it

Voice routing runs on Omni-Channel flows. Salesforce ships standard flow templates for the Open CTI migration, and they cover the common cases: identify the caller, pop the record, route to a queue. Anything your Open CTI adapter did that those templates do not, such as routing on a custom field, an IVR result or a customer tier, has to be built as a flow. That is usually where the custom softphone logic from the old adapter ends up living, so the list of what it did is worth having before the flow work starts.

Check this before you check the vendor

When teams start planning an Open CTI migration, the first call is usually to the telephony vendor, to ask about the connector. We tell clients to check their Omni-Channel status first. The connector conversation takes an hour and the answer is almost always “yes, we support Voice”. The Omni-Channel answer is what decides whether the migration is a quarter or a year.

Sources for everything above are on our references page.

Find out in five minutes

Whether Omni-Channel is enabled, whether Lightning is fully adopted, how many seats sit on Open CTI, and what was built on top of it: the free, read-only Open CTI Retirement Scan reports all of it in about five minutes, and suggests a start window based on the size of the job. Nothing is installed, and your admin can revoke access at any time.

Related work

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