Exotel: Total Cost of Ownership Calculator
Built an AI-assisted web-based TCO calculator that transformed a complex Excel model into a customer-facing experience, reducing sales quotation turnaround from 2 hours to under 5 minutes.
Exotel: Total Cost of Ownership Calculator
The Problem
The sales team at Exotel was facing significant operational bottlenecks while creating and sharing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculations with prospects.
The entire process was dependent on a highly complex Excel sheet that required manual intervention and technical understanding. As the number of inbound prospects increased, the sales team struggled to scale the process efficiently.
Key challenges included:
- Complex calculations that were difficult for sales teams to explain and operate
- Heavy dependency on Excel formulas and interconnected fields
- Manual effort required to prepare the sheet before sharing externally
- Time spent hiding formulas, internal fields, and sensitive calculations
- Lack of a customer-friendly interface for prospects to self-understand pricing and channel requirements
Impact of the Problem
The inefficiencies directly impacted sales velocity and prospect experience.
- Sales teams were spending up to 2 hours generating and validating a single TCO quotation.
- Delays in sharing proposals slowed down the sales cycle.
- Prospects lacked transparency and clarity around pricing calculations.
- Sales productivity reduced significantly due to repetitive manual work.
- Scaling outbound campaigns using the calculator became nearly impossible.
Solution Designed & Implemented
To solve this, I designed and built a web-based TCO Calculator that simplified the entire process for both the sales team and prospects.
The idea was to transform a complicated backend Excel model into a simple, intuitive, customer-facing experience.
What the Solution Did
- Converted the complex Excel-based TCO model into an interactive web application.
- Simplified the user experience using drag-and-drop and minimal-input fields.
- Automatically calculated:
- Required channels
- Call estimations
- Infrastructure requirements
- Total cost of ownership comparison between Exotel and Telco lines
- Created a dedicated customer-facing screen that could be directly shared with prospects.
- Removed the need for manual formula hiding and Excel cleanup.
My Role & Execution
I independently drove the end-to-end execution of the project.
Product & Workflow Design
- Identified the mandatory input fields required for accurate calculations.
- Mapped backend formulas to relevant frontend inputs.
- Simplified the calculation flow to make it understandable for non-technical users.
- Designed separate internal and customer-facing workflows.
AI-Assisted Development
- Used Claude to structure formulas, map logic, and generate calculation workflows.
- Used ChatGPT for UI/code iteration and project structuring.
- Used Lovable to refine frontend UI and improve the customer experience layer.
Outcome & Business Impact
The solution was successfully adopted across the sales organisation and became an active part of Exotel's sales motion.
Key outcomes included:
- Reduced TCO quotation turnaround time from 2 hours to under 5 minutes.
- Enabled sales teams to instantly share live TCO calculations with prospects.
- Improved sales efficiency and reduced manual operational dependency.
- Increased scalability for outbound and demand generation campaigns.
- Simplified complex infrastructure pricing into a transparent, customer-friendly experience.
- Enabled faster decision-making for prospects during sales conversations.
Today, the calculator is actively used by the sales team to accelerate customer discussions and simplify pricing consultations at scale.