Closing the PSTN Black Hole
How a youth homelessness nonprofit captures every call with Amazon Connect.
Customer Snapshot
A California-based nonprofit dedicated to empowering homeless youth set out to modernize the way it handles inbound communication. With more than 200 beds across multiple facilities, a portfolio of job-training programs, and an active volunteer and donor network, the organization needed a phone experience that could keep pace with the people it serves. Facing limited staff capacity, leadership turned to HiveTek to explore how AWS and Amazon Connect could ensure no call from a youth in crisis, donor, or volunteer goes unanswered.
The Challenge
Inbound calls were routed from Amazon Connect out to staff cell phones over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). When staff were unavailable, calls were silently captured by individual carrier-level voicemail boxes — and from Amazon Connect's perspective, the transfer had succeeded. This is a pattern HiveTek refers to as the "PSTN Black Hole": the moment a third-party carrier voicemail answers, the platform marks the call complete and the interaction disappears from the controlled AWS environment.
The downstream impact was significant. Urgent voicemails from youth seeking shelter, donors trying to give, and volunteers offering time were stranded on individual mobile devices. There was no centralized recording or transcription, no ability to apply Amazon Connect Contact Lens analytics, and no way to trigger automated follow-up. Leadership had no visibility into how many youth were actually trying to reach services, or how many supporters were trying to engage with the mission.
With the 2025 Giving Tuesday campaign approaching — a season that historically drives both a spike in donor outreach and an increase in youth seeking shelter through the holidays — the organization could not afford to keep losing calls. Modernizing inbound communications became the first actionable outcome of the engagement.
What HiveTek Delivered
HiveTek identified a production-proven configuration that would close the PSTN Black Hole without re-platforming. By shortening the external transfer duration to 15–18 seconds — deliberately shorter than the 20–30 seconds it typically takes a carrier voicemail to answer — every unanswered call is pulled back into Amazon Connect before it can be hijacked by a carrier mailbox. Scoped, built, and launched ahead of 2025 Giving Tuesday in weeks, not months.
Calls Reclaimed from the PSTN
Unanswered transfers to staff cell phones return to Amazon Connect and are captured by the platform's voicemail pipeline instead of an individual carrier voicemail box.
Voicemail Transcription & Email-to-Action
Every voicemail is automatically transcribed and delivered, with a secure audio link, to the appropriate intake or donor-services team — no more manual mailbox checking.
Automated Caller Acknowledgement
An SMS confirms the message was received and points the caller to additional resources, providing immediate reassurance to youth in crisis and donors alike.
Real-Time & Historical Reporting
Amazon Connect dashboards give leadership full visibility into call volume, queue performance, and follow-up — enabling data-driven operations and impact reporting for the first time.
Foundation for AI
With all interactions flowing through Amazon Connect, Contact Lens sentiment and intent analysis is available out-of-the-box, and CRM follow-up tasks can be triggered automatically by AWS Lambda.
Inside the Build
HiveTek designed and delivered a fully serverless voicemail-reclamation and intake solution on AWS, built around Amazon Connect and AWS Lambda. The core insight: rather than rely on the PSTN to behave correctly when a staff member is unavailable, configure the Amazon Connect contact flow to time out the external transfer attempt before any carrier voicemail can answer, then reclaim the call back into the controlled AWS environment for capture, transcription, and downstream automation.
The reclaimed call is processed through Voicemail Express v3, the AWS-published reference implementation for Amazon Connect voicemail. From there, audio is captured via Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, transcribed by Amazon Transcribe, stored in Amazon S3, and delivered to the right team — every step orchestrated by small, single-purpose Lambda functions and AWS-native event sources.
Voicemail Reclamation & Transcription Architecture — Amazon Connect external-transfer reclaim + Voicemail Express v3 on AWS
Results & Business Impact
Amazon Connect and Voicemail Express v3 gave the nonprofit a controlled, observable inbound channel — and the confidence that no crisis call, donor pledge, or volunteer offer would be lost again:
Every unanswered external transfer is reclaimed inside AWS instead of disappearing into an individual staff mailbox.
Transcribed voicemails and secure audio links land in the right team's inbox via Amazon SES within minutes of the missed call.
An automated SMS confirms receipt and points youth and donors to additional resources the moment they leave a message.
Leadership sees call volume, queue performance, and follow-up trends in Amazon Connect for the first time — powering impact reporting to donors and the board.
Scoped, built, and launched ahead of the 2025 Giving Tuesday campaign so no crisis call or donor outreach was lost during the season.
AWS Building Blocks
The Amazon Connect and AWS components behind the nonprofit's voicemail-reclamation solution.
Core Voice & Compute
- •Amazon Connect — cloud inbound voice, IVR, queues, real-time and historical reporting; Transfer-to-phone block set to a 15–18s timeout to reclaim calls before carrier voicemail.
- •AWS Lambda — Voicemail Express v3 functions; event-driven capture, packaging, transcription triggering, and notification.
Notification & Intelligence
- •Amazon SES — delivers transcriptions and secure audio links to the right distribution list (intake, donor services, volunteers).
- •Amazon SNS — automated SMS acknowledgement to the caller.
- •Amazon Connect Contact Lens — sentiment and intent analysis to prioritize youth-in-crisis messages.
Capture, Storage & Transcription
- •Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and Kinesis Data Streams — capture call audio and Contact Trace Records.
- •Amazon S3 — durable, encrypted storage of voicemail audio and transcripts.
- •Amazon Transcribe — converts voicemail audio into searchable, actionable text.
Ops, Security & Delivery
- •Amazon CloudWatch — monitoring, alerting, and operational visibility.
- •Amazon SQS — dead-letter queue for failed invocations and graceful degradation.
- •AWS IAM, AWS KMS, and S3/Kinesis encryption — least-privilege access, key management, and in-transit and at-rest protection.
- •AWS CloudFormation — infrastructure-as-code with automated rollback for safe deploys.
Losing calls to carrier voicemail? HiveTek helps mission-driven organizations close the PSTN Black Hole with Amazon Connect — so every call from a youth in crisis, donor, or volunteer is captured, transcribed, and acted on.
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