3CX API is useless in practice

[wohletho]

For our customer a special CRM should be integrated. It seemed like a good idea to use the 3CX API. This is a modern interface and easy to use thanks to the template mechanism. Unfortunately, I found that the interface is useless in practice. It allows you to display CRM data on incoming calls, but if you want to call someone, you cannot display their phone number. At least if this person has not called yet, which would result in an import of his record. Of course, you could ask all your contacts to call you once so that their record is available in 3CX, but that's nonsense ;-) The only thing missing for the 3CX API to work is a function that sends a request for a contact to the CRM. The first and last name would probably fit as query parameters. Please complete the great approach to CRM integration!
By the way, I would like to note a small bug in the 3CX API. When querying a phone number, the '+' sign is not URL-encoded. This causes traditional frameworks, such as SpringBoot, to interpret the character as a space. If 3CX would send '%2B' instead of the '+' character, it would be correct.

 

[edossantos]

For our customer a special CRM should be integrated. It seemed like a good idea to use the 3CX API. This is a modern interface and easy to use thanks to the template mechanism. Unfortunately, I found that the interface is useless in practice. It allows you to display CRM data on incoming calls, but if you want to call someone, you cannot display their phone number. At least if this person has not called yet, which would result in an import of his record. Of course, you could ask all your contacts to call you once so that their record is available in 3CX, but that's nonsense ;-) The only thing missing for the 3CX API to work is a function that sends a request for a contact to the CRM. The first and last name would probably fit as query parameters. Please complete the great approach to CRM integration!

The contact lookup mechanism works for inbound and outbound calls. So, you can use the click to call browser extensions to call your contacts directly from the CRM interface (if it's web based), and then the Web Client will show the contact name.

By the way, I would like to note a small bug in the 3CX API. When querying a phone number, the '+' sign is not URL-encoded. This causes traditional frameworks, such as SpringBoot, to interpret the character as a space. If 3CX would send '%2B' instead of the '+' character, it would be correct.

Thanks for pointing this out, we will check it.