I was playing around with a thought the other day. When my iPhone rings, it shows up on my Apple Watch, my iPad, and my MacBook Pro. I can answer that call from any of those devices. That got me thinking, I wonder if I could click a link on my laptop, that would make an outbound call. The answer is, YES, you can dial from your browser and here’s how.
It turns out there is a universal URL schema called “tel:”. It works like the “mailto:” command. If you type: tel://5155555555 into the browser’s URL, it will use your default calling app to place that phone call.
Click to Tweet: Who knew you could dial a phone number using the “tel:” command in your browser’s URL? #Salesforce #FunFact Click To TweetI took it step further and created a link within Salesforce and voila (or wa-lah for us non-French people), I have a free and simple click to dial. Here’s how to do it.
· Go to Setup and to the Contact Object Manager
· Create a new field of Type Formula:
o Output Type: Text
o Field Label: “Call w/Facetime”
o Formula: HYPERLINK(“tel://” + Phone, “Click to Dial”, “_blank” )
When I click the “Click to Dial”, Facetime is launched, and a confirmation message appears. The first time I did this, I received an additional prompt asking me to confirm it was okay to open the link. I clicked the checkbox to Always open these links and proceeded.
Press the Call button and voila, the computer called my contact.
Since the “Tel:” schema is universal, I thought I’d try this out on my windows computer. In theory, it should work too. Here’s what happened on Windows.
First, I had to confirm the opening of the “tel:” link. That was the same as on my Mac but my Mac already knew what App to use.
On Windows, I had to select my calling app. You should be able to use Skype or Microsoft Teams. Once I selected my app, I received the prompt to place the call.
Hope you have fun as much fun with this I did. This isn’t a perfect solution but for a simple and free solution, you might want to give it a try.
If you have questions or need some help, just yell. You can reach me using my contact form here.
Click to Tweet: Another fun Terry’s Tidbits. Use a Formula field to create a click to dial link in #Salesforce Click To Tweet