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Out of hours, the usual answer is a list of personal mobile numbers, or one shared phone passed round the team. Neither works well: callers end up with numbers they shouldn't have, and nobody's sure who has the phone tonight.

An on-call line works the other way round:

1. The caller rings your on-call number, or your main number after hours, and is placed in an on-call queue. They hear that you're contacting the person on call, then a hold message.
2. Standby sees a caller waiting and wakes whoever your rotation says is on call tonight: a notification, then a phone call if nobody acknowledges. If they don't answer, the next person on the rotation is tried.
3. The person on call takes the call in Amazon Connect, from the queue, like any other call.

The caller never learns anybody's personal number, and nobody has to remember who's on call: the rotation decides.

Two ways callers reach the on-call queue

• A dedicated on-call number. A separate number that goes straight to the on-call queue, day or night. Give it to the people who need it: building security, a key customer, your own staff. The template below can claim one for you.
• Your main number, after hours. In your existing contact flow, send callers who arrive out of hours to the on-call queue instead of playing a "we're closed" message. During the day they reach your usual queues as normal.

You can use both: one queue, two ways in.

What the caller hears

A greeting ("our office is closed, so we're contacting the person on call for you now"), then a hold message while they wait. If nobody has answered within the wait limit (5 minutes unless you change it), they hear a message asking them to call again, rather than holding forever. You choose all three messages when you set it up. See What callers hear.

What the person on call does

They're woken by the Standby app, acknowledge so the rotation stops trying others, then take the call in Amazon Connect, signed in and set to Available. Two ways to take it:

• In the Connect softphone on a laptop, or in a browser on their phone.
• On their own mobile, without the caller seeing the number. In Amazon Connect an agent can choose Desk phone and enter their mobile number: Connect then rings their mobile and connects the caller through itself, so the caller only ever sees your number.

Everyone on the rotation should let Standby's calls through Do Not Disturb, or a silenced phone at night will miss the call.

Set it up

1. Create the on-call queue, its flows and, if you want one, its number. In the console, go to On-call → After-hours calls and use the button there. It opens a template in your AWS account that creates the queue (STANDBY-QUEUE unless you name it), its hours, the greeting and hold flows, and optionally claims a phone number and points it at the queue. Standby isn't given any new permission by this: you run it with your own credentials.
2. Add the queue to the routing profile of everyone on the rotation, at priority 1 with no delay (Amazon Connect: Routing → Routing profiles). Standby can't do this for you, and without it Connect never offers them the call.
3. To use your main number after hours too, change your contact flow's out-of-hours branch to Set working queue → your on-call queue → Transfer to queue.
4. Have a rotation for the people who take these calls. See Rotations, time off and cover.
5. Write the rule that wakes them. In Rules, choose New rule:
   • On which queue: the on-call queue.
   • Watch for: Contacts waiting in a queue.
   • Above: 0. Thresholds mean "more than", so 0 fires on the first caller; 1 would wait for a second.
   • For at least: Any single reading.
   • When this fires: Push, then call, even during quiet hours. A caller waiting is exactly when somebody should be woken.
   • Pages: the rotation.
6. Make it live now. New rules start Pending and page nobody for 7 days. Any caller in this queue is one you want answered, so choose Review on the rule, then Promote early…, and give a reason.
7. Test it. Choose Simulate on the rule, pick At a particular time in the middle of the night, and check who would be woken. Then make a real test call to the on-call number and time how long it takes to answer.

Good to know

• Calls are placed and answered by your Amazon Connect instance, on your AWS bill at Connect's usual rates. Standby charges nothing per call.
• Chats and voicemail too. Set the rule's Channel to Tasks (including voicemail) to be woken by a waiting voicemail but not by calls, or leave it on Any channel.
• A queue somebody watches by day. Rules have no hours of their own. If you point an existing daytime queue at this, set the rotation's When this rotation is on duty to Outside business hours only, so daytime callers record an incident but wake nobody.
• Calls transferred to one named agent wait in that agent's own queue, which Standby doesn't read, so they won't wake the rotation.

Related guides

• Take after-hours calls
• Alert rules and shadow mode
• When you're paged