Your softphone has a deadline. Find out what depends on it.

What is being retired

Open CTI is the piece of Salesforce that puts your telephony vendor’s phone panel in the utility bar. It answers the call, opens the right record as the phone rings, dials when an agent clicks a number, and writes the details of the call onto a Task afterwards. Vonage and most other vendors deliver their Salesforce integration through it, and many teams have built their own softphone features on top of it over the years.

Salesforce has set the end-of-life date at 28 February 2028 (Salesforce Knowledge Article 005306437). Open CTI is already in maintenance mode, which means no new capability is coming, and new Service Cloud orgs cannot get it at all. After that date Open CTI stops working, so anything that depends on it needs to have moved by then.

1. 2026Take stock. Find out what depends on Open CTI, check where your vendor stands with Voice, and choose a path.
2. 2027Migrate. Omni-Channel first, then the Voice call centre, then the rebuild and re-pointing work, then a phased cut-over.
3. 28 Feb 2028End of life. Open CTI is retired and stops working.

What replaces it

The replacement is Partner Contact Center Voice. Until 2026 Salesforce called it Salesforce Voice with Partner Telephony, and its migration guides and Setup screens still do; before that it was Service Cloud Voice. Your telephony vendor plugs in through a Voice connector rather than an Open CTI adapter, and the Salesforce side is built around that connector. Voice makes demands that Open CTI never did, and most of the migration work follows from them.

Voice runs in Lightning Experience only, so anyone still working in Salesforce Classic moves first. It is not available in the Salesforce mobile app, so anyone taking calls on their phone needs a desktop set-up. Calls are written to a new object called VoiceCall rather than to the call fields on a Task, which affects every report and automation built on those fields. Omni-Channel has to be switched on and designed for calls before Voice can be set up at all. And Salesforce and the telephony provider bill separately, so there is a new licence line to plan for.

Why it is more than swapping the phone

It is tempting to treat this as a connector swap, with the vendor doing the work. In practice the change reaches into four parts of the business.

The softphone itself. The vendor’s Open CTI adapter is replaced by its Voice connector. Anything your own team built on the Open CTI API, whether in Visualforce, Aura, Lightning Web Components or a static resource, has to be rebuilt as a Voice Extension or with the Voice Toolkit. In a mature org that is often more code than anyone remembers.

Your call data. Flows, triggers, validation rules, reports and dashboards built on the Task call fields, such as call type, duration and result, point at fields that Voice no longer writes to. Nothing breaks on cut-over day; the numbers simply stop moving, and it can be weeks before anyone notices. Each one needs re-pointing to VoiceCall, or retiring, before the switch. Salesforce’s guidance allows a bridge, a flow that recreates the Task after each call, so old reports keep counting while they are moved; it has to be built before the switch too.

Routing and the agent desktop. Omni-Channel becomes the routing engine for calls, so service channels, presence statuses and queues have to be designed from scratch, or reviewed if you already use Omni-Channel for cases and chat. Voice also lives in the Lightning console rather than in a panel beside it, so every agent’s daily routine changes on cut-over day, and training belongs in the plan alongside the build.

Licences and contracts. The Salesforce licence is Partner Contact Center, at 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, so this is a new line in the Salesforce budget rather than a replacement for one. Prices were verified on salesforce.com on 29 September 2026.

How much of this applies to you depends on what your org has built over the years. The scan lists it by name, in about five minutes.

Three ways forward

There are three places to go, and each comes with a different vendor conversation and a different bill.

Stay with your vendor. Keep the telephony provider you have and move the Salesforce side to Partner Contact Center Voice. This is the least disruptive path, because the phone system, the numbers and the IVR all stay where they are and the work is on the Salesforce side. Check that the vendor’s package is generally available on AgentExchange, not in pilot. Salesforce lists Amazon Connect, Five9, Genesys, NiCE and Vonage as vendors with out-of-the-box Voice integration, and Aircall documents a route of its own. For RingCentral, 8x8, Talkdesk and Dialpad, ask the vendor.

Move to Amazon Connect. Salesforce sells it as Partner Contact Center with Amazon Connect and runs the instance for you, priced by minute tier (from USD 75, EUR 75 or GBP 60 per user per month) on an annual contract. If you already run your own Amazon Connect, Salesforce connects to that instead and AWS keeps billing you. It is a larger project than the first path, because the phone system changes as well as the integration, and it belongs on a longer timeline.

Take Salesforce’s own Contact Center. Salesforce supplies the telephony itself, at USD 125 per user per month at list; Salesforce Help calls it Agentforce Contact Center. It is the simplest end state for a team that wants one vendor and one bill. It is now sold in more than 30 countries, with your own carrier or a Salesforce-certified regional one, but as of September 2026 there is no EUR or GBP list price, so UK and EU teams need a quote. If you take card payments by phone, confirm PCI scope with Salesforce first.

When to start

That depends on how much of your org leans on Open CTI, and the scan uses three bands to answer it. A large org, with custom softphone code, more than 50 seats or several active call centres, should take stock in 2026 and start in the first half of 2027. A small org, with up to nine seats, no custom code and Omni-Channel already on, should start in the second half of 2027 at the latest. Everything in between is a medium org, which should start in 2027 and plan for two quarters from beginning to end.

The work spans Salesforce set-up, vendor contracts and agent change, so it rarely fits in a single quarter. Starting during 2027 leaves room for a phased cut-over well before the deadline, and keeps you out of the final quarter, when late movers will be competing for the same vendors and the same specialists.

Find out where your org stands

Most teams cannot say which band they are in, because nobody has counted. The scan does the counting. It reads your org’s configuration, code and record counts through the Salesforce APIs, never the content of any record, and returns a six-page report in about five minutes.

The report gives you four things. The number of seats on Open CTI, so the licence figure is real. The custom softphone code that calls the Open CTI API, by name. The flows, triggers, reports and dashboards that lean on the call fields and will need re-pointing. And where you stand on Omni-Channel, Lightning and licences, with a suggested start window based on the size of the job.

A Salesforce administrator signs in and approves access. Salesforce’s consent screen calls the permission “Manage user data via APIs”; the scan only reads. Nothing is installed, and access can be revoked at any time from Setup. Run it on a sandbox first if you prefer. We ask for a name, work email and company, email you the report, and keep a copy so we can follow up on it.

CX Labs has been a Salesforce partner since 2019, is rated five stars on AppExchange, and has partnered with Vonage to bring telephony into Salesforce.

Not the admin? Take the budget brief instead

If you own the budget rather than the org, you do not need to authorise anything. The brief is four pages: the seat maths, the Salesforce licence cost at list price, the work a migration actually contains, and a timeline you can put against a 2027 budget round. Leave a work email and it is yours.

Turn the report into a plan

The report tells you what depends on Open CTI. The Migration Roadmap turns that into something your leadership can approve. It is fixed-fee work, agreed before we start. We start by confirming the findings against your org and with your telephony vendor, agreeing the path and settling who owns what. We then size the rebuild and re-pointing work, the Omni-Channel design and the agent change, and draft the plan with the licence numbers in it. You receive a timeline with a phased cut-over, a budget line, and a one-page summary for the people who sign it off.

Every fact and Salesforce Help article on this page is listed, with sources, on our references page. Questions first? solutions@cxlabs.co.