By Justin Downes, PR & Communications
Click-to-call (also commonly called click-to-dial) is quickly becoming one of the most requested features in modern customer platforms—not as a “nice-to-have” widget, but as a core workflow tool for call centres, sales teams, and customer service operations.
As part of ongoing conversations about current trends in web calling and contact centre technology, I spoke with Conrad De Wet, CEO at Siperb, about what he’s seeing in the market and why CRM-embedded calling is accelerating in 2026.
A clear market shift: calling is moving into the system of record
A few years ago, click-to-call was mostly discussed as a website conversion feature. In 2026, the centre of gravity has shifted.
Today, the demand is coming from inside the business—specifically from teams that spend their day inside the CRM, the customer database, and the operational tools that sit around them. In those environments, calling is no longer something that should happen “somewhere else”. It is expected to live where the customer context lives.
“The call centre doesn’t want more tabs,” De Wet told me. “They want the call action living in the same place as the customer context—history, notes, next steps—so agents can work faster and make fewer mistakes.”
Why call centres are driving adoption
In my discussion with De Wet, three drivers came up repeatedly.
First, speed of follow-up is now a competitive advantage. Call centres and sales teams are under pressure to respond faster than ever—especially in high-volume environments where every minute matters. “Speed isn’t a nice metric,” De Wet said. “It’s directly tied to contact rates and conversion. If you make agents manually dial and switch systems, you’ve already introduced delay.”
Second, manual dialling creates a hidden productivity tax. Copying numbers, switching apps, and re-entering context feels minor—until you do it hundreds of times a day. De Wet pointed out that teams often underestimate the cumulative effect: “You don’t notice five seconds lost. You notice the end-of-day throughput. The small frictions stack up into missed opportunities.”
Third, the quality of the customer experience is shaped by agent workflow. When agents can call from inside the CRM, the experience for the customer tends to improve too—because the agent has context instantly: previous interactions, account notes, open tickets, and outcomes. “That’s when service feels joined-up,” De Wet told me. “It’s not just faster—it’s more coherent.”
What CRM-embedded click-to-call looks like in practice
The implementation is often simple on the surface. A call icon sits next to a number field, a Call button appears on a customer record, or click-to-call actions appear inside lead lists and ticket views. But the business impact can be significant.
When calling is embedded in the system of record, teams typically find they can reduce avoidable errors, increase consistency in follow-up, keep call outcomes tied to the customer record, and onboard new agents faster because there’s less system-hopping and fewer tools to learn.
Why browser-based calling is gaining traction in 2026
Another theme that emerged is the growing role of browser-based calling in contact centre environments, particularly for distributed or hybrid teams.
As De Wet explained, “If the calling experience can live in the browser, it simplifies deployment and reduces dependency on desktop installs. That matters when teams scale quickly or work remotely.”
In practice, browser calling frequently relies on WebRTC, and many organisations bridge that experience into existing VoIP or SIP environments to align with established routing, queueing, and reporting requirements.
The part that matters most: reliability at scale
PR tends to celebrate features. Operations teams care about outcomes.
De Wet was blunt about the real requirement: “If click-to-call is embedded into the CRM and it’s unreliable, agents won’t trust it. In a call centre, that becomes a daily friction point.”
In real environments, reliability can be influenced by network variability, firewall and NAT behaviour, device permissions, headset quirks, audio edge cases that only appear at scale, and routing consistency into existing telephony infrastructure.
This is where vendors and platforms in the space differentiate—less on the button itself, and more on the operational resilience behind it. Siperb, De Wet noted, focuses on bridging browser calling into real SIP environments in a way designed for production use rather than demo conditions.
What to watch next
From a market perspective, the trend line is clear: calling is becoming native to customer workflows.
Over the rest of 2026, we’re likely to see CRM and customer-platform providers embed click-to-call actions across more touchpoints in the customer lifecycle, tighten the link between call outcomes and customer records, and improve support for browser calling for distributed teams.
As De Wet put it: “The winning platforms will be the ones that keep agents in context—call, notes, outcome, next step—without leaving the record.”
Closing
Click-to-call is not a new idea. What’s new in 2026 is where it’s being treated as essential: inside the CRM and customer database tools that run day-to-day operations.
And as more organisations optimise for faster follow-up, cleaner workflows, and better customer experience, CRM-embedded calling looks set to become a standard expectation rather than a differentiator.
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