Cloud communication platform for businesses

Twilio and Plivo were built for developers, not businesses

I ran a competitive analysis across the category's incumbents — Twilio, Plivo and MessageBird — mapping their own user journeys and running a heuristic evaluation against each. Twilio's and Plivo's builders in particular made the gap obvious: powerful, but clearly designed for engineers reading API docs, not a business owner trying to route a support line.

A trial account, not a sales call, as the first step

Instead of gating the product behind a demo request, we built a self-serve trial: register, and Airtel IQ hands you a working test number — an "intelliphone" — to actually experience the platform on before committing to anything.

The whole trial is one linear path, deliberately: register, activate the number, pick a call-flow template, configure it, test it, then see the results land in your own call logs.

Five screens, one continuous loop

Every trial user gets their own intelliphone — a live number they activate by calling it from their own registered phone. That unlocks a library of ready-made inbound and outbound templates, each with a live preview and a plain-language description, so nobody starts from a blank canvas. Picking one drops the business straight into an editable flow: reroute a branch, swap the audio a caller hears, add or remove a step, each block opening its own configuration panel in place.

Testing a flow returns a real number to dial from that same intelliphone — the business hears their own configuration as an actual incoming call — then lands in a call logs dashboard with the same metrics a paid account would see, filterable down to just what that business cares about.

From flowchart sketches to a shipped design system

The campaign builder went through a few structural directions before the final one: an early pass that read more like a marketing flowchart tool, a card-based alternative that broke a flow into named sections (Greeting, IVR Menu, Other Inputs), and a node-tree layout that turned out to be the shape everything else got built on.

Getting from those explorations to the final version took a few rounds of client and user feedback, not one clean decision. Some directions were too limited — a fixed flowchart shape that couldn't hold a real branching IVR without breaking. Others were too customizable — a free-canvas node graph that let anyone drag nodes anywhere, which felt flexible in a demo but left every real flow as a tangle someone had to manually tidy up. The sweet spot was a structure flexible enough for actual call logic but constrained enough to stay manageable on one screen without the business doing any layout work of its own.

The shipped version takes layout off the user's hands entirely: nodes arrange themselves, and the canvas moves to follow whichever node you click, so what you're configuring stays in view instead of scrolling off-screen. Zooming out is still there for anyone who wants to see the whole flow at once — but it's optional, not something the earlier explorations ever let you skip. All of it built on Airtel's existing brand — colours, buttons, inputs, icons — so the tool reads as one product with the rest of Airtel Business, not something bolted on beside it.