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Aircall is how Vortex IQ rings the on-call phone when a sleeping merchant has a five-figure incident on their store.

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What is Aircall?

Aircall is a cloud business phone system, a SaaS PBX built for sales and support teams. It runs on browsers, mobile apps, and desktops, with no on-premise hardware. The product is best known for tight CRM hooks into Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Intercom, and Zendesk, plus native call recording, IVR, queues, and analytics. Mid-market sales floors and customer-support teams in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia are the typical buyers, with seat counts usually in the 10 to 500 range. Aircall sells reliable voice. That is the primary reason Vortex IQ pairs with it: when a Shopify checkout has gone dark at 02:00 local time, a Slack notification will not wake anyone, but a phone ringing on the bedside table will.

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Why Vortex IQ uses Aircall as an alert channel

Vortex IQ is not a Computer Telephony Integration. We do not pull call analytics from Aircall into the Nerve Centre, and Aircall is not listed among our KPI sources. Aircall is strictly an outbound delivery surface for the highest tier of incident: severity-one events where silent-failure cost is rising in real time. Examples of merchant incidents that escalate to an Aircall voice call:
  • Checkout error rate above 5 percent for 10 consecutive minutes during a peak window.
  • Shopify, BigCommerce, or Adobe Commerce store completely down.
  • Payment-gateway disconnect (Stripe, PayPal, Cybersource) when revenue at risk crosses a configured threshold.
  • Catalogue drift detection during a flash sale: ads still serving for SKUs that went out of stock.
Email and Slack are first-line. PagerDuty is the routing brain. Aircall is the wake-up.

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What gets delivered

Aircall delivers Vortex IQ alerts as an automated outbound voice call to a specific user or call queue. The call body is a synthesised voice script generated from the incident payload:
  • Incident severity and a one-line summary.
  • Affected store name, integration type, and platform.
  • Trigger metric and current value (for example, “checkout error rate at 8 percent”).
  • Estimated revenue at risk for the active window in the merchant’s local currency.
  • A short reference identifier that links back to the Vortex IQ incident page.
Recipients can press a key on the keypad to acknowledge the incident, snooze it, or escalate it back to the next on-call rotation. Acknowledgements are written back to the incident feed in the Nerve Centre.

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How it integrates

  • Authentication: OAuth 2.0 against Aircall’s REST API plus a long-lived API token for programmatic call origination.
  • Outbound trigger: Vortex IQ posts to Aircall’s calls API with a target user identifier, a number to ring, and a templated voice script.
  • Number provisioning: merchants supply one or more Aircall numbers as the source caller-ID, so on-call recipients see a known number rather than an unknown caller.
  • Region awareness: when the merchant operates across multiple geographies, Vortex IQ matches the on-call rota’s timezone and routes the call only to the recipient currently on shift.
  • Rate limiting: Vortex IQ throttles voice calls to one per minute per recipient, with deduplication on the active incident identifier so a flapping monitor cannot generate a runaway call storm.

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Operational diagnostics

The Vortex IQ Nerve Centre exposes a few diagnostic signals so merchants can confirm Aircall escalation is healthy:
  • Last successful test call timestamp per Aircall number.
  • Acknowledgement rate, the share of incident calls answered or keypad-acknowledged within two minutes.
  • Failed-delivery log, with Aircall API error codes (for example, busy line, voicemail full, invalid number).
  • Voice-script render preview, so on-call staff can see exactly what the synthesised call will say before an incident fires.
If Aircall is down or returns sustained 5xx responses, Vortex IQ degrades gracefully to the next channel in the escalation chain (typically PagerDuty, then SMS via Twilio or Vonage).

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Connect Aircall to Vortex IQ

Add Aircall as a notification channel from the Vortex IQ settings page. Bring an Aircall API token, pick the numbers and users that should receive escalation calls, and Ask Viq will route severity-one incidents into the channel from the next deployment forward.