Help › Recipes

Close the lines in an emergency

A building is evacuated, a system is down, or nobody can take calls. Close a queue from your phone, and it reopens by itself.

This is for admins setting it up once, and for whoever is on call when it's needed. When you're done, new callers hear your own closed message instead of waiting on hold for nobody, and the queue opens again at a time you chose.

What you'll set up (once, before you need it)

Closing a queue points it at an always-closed hours of operation. Callers then go down the Out of hours branch of your Check hours of operation block. That only works if the block reads the queue's hours, so an admin checks it first.

In each flow on your callers' path, open the Check hours of operation block and make sure it has no hours set on the block itself. A block with its own hours ignores the queue's, and closing would change nothing for callers.
Check its Out of hours branch leads somewhere useful, such as your closed message or voicemail. If you use override branches, such as a holiday greeting, check those too: one that skips Out of hours also skips a Standby closure.
Update the Standby stack in CloudFormation and set FlowsCheckHoursOfOperation to true. Standby can't read your flows, so this is how you tell it you've checked.

Until that's done, the app doesn't offer closing at all. The full checklist is in Check two branches in your contact flows, and stack updates are in Update the stack.

Close a queue

On your phone, go to Settings → Queues and tap the queue. Or, from an incident, look under What you can do.
Tap Close this queue, so new contacts stop arriving.
Under For how long, choose 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours.
Tap Apply for 1 hour (or your choice), and confirm with your fingerprint or face. The prompt names the change, such as "Close Support to new contacts · 60 minutes". Your phone needs to be enrolled.
Repeat for each queue you need closed. Standby closes one queue at a time.

It takes up to a minute to reach callers, because Amazon Connect caches queue settings.

What callers hear

Anyone already in the queue stays in it and is answered as normal.
New contacts go down your Out of hours branch and hear whatever your flow does there. Standby plays nothing itself. See What callers hear.

It undoes itself

When the time is up, Standby points the queue back at its real hours, whether or not anyone remembers. Expect it within a minute of the end time, then up to another minute to reach callers.

Under Settings → Actions in force, Undo now reopens it early and +30 min extends it. You get a reminder five minutes before it ends.
A closure can't last more than 4 hours in total. If you still need it after that, close the queue again once it has reopened.
If someone changes the queue's hours by hand in Amazon Connect meanwhile, Standby leaves their change alone and reports a conflict.

Try it safely first

In business hours, pick a test queue nobody calls.
Close it from Settings → Queues for 15 minutes.
Wait a minute and call in. You should hear your Out of hours branch. If you're queued as normal, a block on that path has its own hours set.
Tap Undo now.

Variations

Busy, not broken. If agents are working but overwhelmed, a cap is gentler: callers already waiting are answered, and only the overflow is turned away. See Cap an overloaded queue from your phone at 2am.
A planned closure, such as a holiday or a training afternoon, belongs in your hours of operation in Amazon Connect. Standby's closure is for the unplanned kind and starts when you apply it.