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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.

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Open CTI retires on 28 February 2028, and the question every Salesforce team with a phone panel asks next is the same one: what replaces it? The answer is Salesforce Voice with Partner Telephony, the product that used to be called Service Cloud Voice. The retirement itself, the timeline and the three ways forward are covered on our Open CTI page; this post is about the replacement, because most of the migration work follows from how it behaves.

Under Open CTI, your telephony vendor’s adapter lives in the utility bar, answers the call, pops the record and writes the outcome to a Task. Under Voice, the vendor plugs in through a Voice connector, and the Salesforce side is built around that connector rather than around a panel beside the console. Five things about Voice do not bend, and each one turns into a line on the plan.

1. Lightning Experience only

Voice does not run in Salesforce Classic. If any of your agents still work in Classic, and in contact centres there are often a few who never moved, they move first. That is a change-management job with its own training and its own timing, and it has to be finished before the first Voice call is placed. Salesforce’s own guide to the transition is on the Lightning Experience help pages.

2. Not available in the Salesforce mobile app

Anyone taking calls through the Salesforce mobile app needs a desktop set-up. For most contact centres that is nobody. For field teams, account managers and anyone who works a queue from their phone, it is a real change to how they do the job, and it belongs in the plan alongside the technical work rather than as a surprise on cut-over day.

3. Calls are written to VoiceCall, not to Task

This is the one that catches teams out. Open CTI writes each call onto a Task: call type, duration, result, and whatever fields your vendor adds. Voice writes calls to a new object, VoiceCall. Every flow, trigger, validation rule, report and dashboard that reads a call field on Task is pointing at something Voice never writes to. Nothing breaks on cut-over day; the numbers just stop moving. We wrote that failure up separately in Your call reports will stop working, and nobody will notice.

4. Omni-Channel must be enabled first

Voice cannot be set up until Omni-Channel is on, because Omni-Channel becomes the routing engine for calls: service channels, presence statuses, queues, capacity. If you already run it for cases or chat, this is a design review. If you have never switched it on, it is a project of its own, and it comes before everything else. This one decides how long the whole migration takes, which is why it gets its own post.

5. Salesforce and the telephony provider bill separately

The Salesforce licence for Voice with Partner Telephony is Partner Contact Center: USD 50, EUR 50 or GBP 40 per user per month at list price, with transcription needing the partner licence on top. Your telephony contract carries on separately, with the vendor. That is a new line in the Salesforce budget, and it is worth putting in front of finance before the renewal conversation rather than after. The list prices, and what the other two paths cost, are in Three ways off Open CTI, and what each one costs.

What this means for the plan

Put those five together and the shape of a migration is clear. It is not a connector swap. It is, in order: Lightning for anyone still on Classic; Omni-Channel designed or reviewed; the Voice call centre set up with the vendor’s connector; anything built on the Open CTI API rebuilt as a Voice Extension or with the Voice Toolkit; every flow, report and dashboard on the Task call fields re-pointed to VoiceCall; agents trained on a console that now looks different; and a phased cut-over that keeps the old adapter alive until the new one is proven. Salesforce’s own migration learning map walks the same sequence.

Every date, price and article referenced here is listed, with sources, on our references page.

Where your org stands

Most teams do not know how many of those five rules bite them, because nobody has counted: the seats on Open CTI, the custom softphone code, the reports on the call fields, the Omni-Channel and Lightning position. That is exactly what our free, read-only Open CTI Retirement Scan produces, by name, in about five minutes. Nothing is installed and your admin can revoke access at any time.

Related work

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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.

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