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Vonage and the Open CTI retirement: what changes for your org

If your agents take calls through Vonage inside Salesforce, the adapter doing it is probably Open CTI. What the retirement means for Vonage customers, what Vonage Premier for Service Cloud Voice changes, and how to sequence it.

SalesforceVonage

Vonage customers are well placed for the Open CTI retirement, and also more exposed to it than most, for the same reason: Vonage has been integrated with Salesforce for a long time, and a lot of that integration runs on the thing being retired.

Which Vonage integration are you on?

There are two. The older Vonage Salesforce adapter is built on Open CTI: it sits in the utility bar, pops the record when the call connects, and writes the outcome onto a Task. Salesforce has placed Open CTI in maintenance mode and retires it on 28 February 2028. The newer integration, Vonage Premier for Service Cloud Voice, runs on Salesforce Voice with Partner Telephony: the call arrives through Omni-Channel, lands on the VoiceCall object, and lives inside the console alongside chat and case work rather than in a panel beside it.

If you are not sure which you have, the tell is where the call data ends up. If your call reports are built on Task and the phone panel is a utility-bar item, it is the Open CTI adapter. If calls appear as VoiceCall records, you are already on Voice and this post is not for you.

What stays and what moves

The reassuring part first. Vonage is one of the vendors Salesforce names as having out-of-the-box Voice integration, so path one on the three ways forward, staying with your vendor, is open to you. The phone system, the numbers, the IVR, the recordings and the Vonage contract all stay where they are. Nothing about the telephony itself has to change.

What moves is the Salesforce side, and it moves in the same way it does for every vendor. Omni-Channel has to be enabled and designed for calls before Voice can be set up. Anything built on top of the Vonage adapter through the Open CTI API, and in mature Vonage orgs there is often quite a lot, has to be rebuilt for Voice. Every flow, report and dashboard on the Task call fields has to be re-pointed to VoiceCall. Agents move from a panel in the utility bar to calls inside the console. And Salesforce adds a Partner Contact Center licence, at USD 50, EUR 50 or GBP 40 per user per month at list, alongside the existing Vonage contract.

It is a migration, not an upgrade, and the difference matters for how it is planned and budgeted.

The IVR and payments question

Vonage orgs are more likely than most to have built something serious on top of the integration, because the IVR is where the interesting work happens: identifying the caller before the agent picks up, routing on account data, and, very often, taking payments. We have done that work twice for the same client. For Pennon Water Services, Vonage and PCI Pal were wired into Salesforce so the account opens as the phone rings and card numbers never reach a person. When that client’s payment provider was later switched off, we rebuilt the IVR and Agent Assist flows on the new provider and cut over in under 30 days, with PCI compliance intact.

The lesson from both is the one that applies to the Open CTI migration: the IVR logic, the payment layer and the Salesforce routing are three systems that have to be moved as one, in a sequence that keeps customers paying and agents answering throughout. That is a cut-over plan, not a connector swap, and it is why Vonage orgs with payments in the IVR should assume they are in the Large band for when to start, whatever the seat count says.

How to sequence it

Take stock first: which adapter, how many seats, what was built on it, whether Omni-Channel is on, what reads the call fields. Talk to Vonage about the Premier connector and its timeline for your account. Design Omni-Channel for calls. Then rebuild, re-point, train and cut over in phases, keeping the Open CTI adapter alive until the new one is proven on a real queue. Started in 2027, that sequence finishes comfortably before the deadline. Started in the last quarter of 2027, it competes for the same Vonage and Salesforce people as everyone else who left it late.

Sources for the retirement, the licence prices and the Salesforce set-up steps are on our references page; how we work with Vonage generally is on our Vonage platform page.

Start with the count

The free, read-only Open CTI Retirement Scan tells you which adapter you are on, how many seats sit on it, what custom code calls the Open CTI API, which flows and reports lean on the call fields, and your Omni-Channel and Lightning position, in about five minutes. Nothing is installed, and your admin can revoke access at any time.

Related work

More from CX Labs on this topic

Blog What Salesforce Voice with Partner Telephony actually changes Salesforce Voice replaces Open CTI, and five of its rules are non-negotiable: Lightning only, no mobile app, calls on VoiceCall, Omni-Channel first, separate billing. Each one shapes the migration.

Blog Your call reports will stop working, and nobody will notice Open CTI writes calls to Task. Salesforce Voice writes them to VoiceCall. Nothing breaks on cut-over day; the old reports just stop showing new calls until someone notices the numbers have gone flat.

Blog 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.

Blog Three ways off Open CTI, and what each one costs Stay with your vendor, move to Amazon Connect, or take Salesforce's native Contact Center. The list prices, who each path suits, and what a 100-seat team pays in Salesforce licences before the vendor's own charges.

Blog When to start your Open CTI migration Seventeen months sounds like a long time. It is not, once you add up routing design, a new call centre, rebuilt softphone code and every report on the old call fields. The bands we use to decide when to start.

Case Studies CX Labs Delivers Seamless Payment Provider Migration The payment provider was being switched off, and thousands of customers pay through it every month. We rebuilt the IVR and Agent Assist flows on Trust Payments and cut over in under 30 days, with PCI compliance intact.

Case Studies Pennon Water Services Streamlines Customer Payments and Telephony Agents were confirming accounts by hand and could take only one payment per call. With Vonage and PCI Pal wired into Salesforce, the account opens as the phone rings, customers settle several sites at once, and card numbers never reach a person.