I believe he means the concept of CTI.
Basically what a CTI does is to merge the telephony world (PSTN/PBX/extensions) and the Computer world (CRM/DB) for a better support and efficient way to attend customers.
How? Well easy and not easy. A CTI will be interconnected somehow to your PBX, a TCP IP link for example as almost every PBX now does. In this way CTI can get ANI, DNIS, Number of calls on an object, etc etc, information that usually is only known by the PBX. With this info on the simplest schema when a call arrives to an agent of a Call Center will not only arrive the call on his phoneset, but also on his PC as you have a CTI agent client which also monitors the agent extension and knows what is going on there, with the call now arrived for example the ANI (Automatic Number Identification) of the customer, so you now can launch something like:
execute(iexplore,"http://intranet/customer.asp?phone="&vANI)
A simple exaple of course, and this will allow the agent to get the data while the phone set is ringing and when he finally picks up he will have the customer data on his face.
Of course the ANI is very basic, you can use an IVR and request for a customer code and a password for example, validate it and then use that customer code as query string.
The CTI agent client is what we call a SoftPhone, which will know what happens on agent extension but can also control it sending commands to answer (pick up), hangup, dial, change agent status, etc etc.
This a very basic idea, hope helps somehow
