Amazon Connect Migration from Avaya: What UK Contact Centres Need to Know Before They Switch

Arkadas Kilic
Arkadas Kilic 9 min read · 2026-05-31

Rel8 CX is an AWS Advanced Partner that builds production Amazon Connect deployments for UK contact centres, typically completing migrations in 4 to 6 weeks. We've migrated teams off Avaya Aura, Avaya IP Office, and Avaya CMS Supervisor. This post covers what actually happens during these migrations, where the pain points are, and what you need to decide before you sign anything.

Why UK Contact Centres Are Leaving Avaya Right Now

Avaya filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 2023. That's the second time in six years. Even if your Avaya instance is running fine today, the long-term support picture is bleak. Maintenance contracts are getting harder to renew, hardware replacements are taking longer, and the talent pool of Avaya-certified engineers is shrinking.

Beyond the existential risk, there's a commercial one. Avaya's on-premise licensing model means you're paying for peak capacity whether you use it or not. A 200-seat contact centre running at 60% occupancy is still paying for 200 seats. Amazon Connect charges per minute of usage, typically between £0.0018 and £0.0025 per customer minute depending on features. For most UK operations, that translates to a 30 to 50% reduction in platform costs in year one.

But cost is not the main reason teams migrate. The main reason is capability. Avaya cannot natively support modern AI voice agents, real-time transcription, or autonomous agentic workflows. Amazon Connect can. And for regulated industries under FCA Consumer Duty obligations, the ability to demonstrate consistent, auditable, and fair customer outcomes is increasingly a compliance requirement, not just a nice-to-have.

What "Migration" Actually Means in Practice

Let's be specific about what you're moving.

What you're replacing: What you're moving to:

None of this is lift-and-shift. You're rebuilding, not copying. That's important to understand because it affects timelines, resource requirements, and what you can improve along the way.

The Five Things That Actually Delay UK Avaya Migrations

We've seen migrations stall at each of these points. None of them are technical. All of them are avoidable with the right preparation.

1. Number Porting

This is the single biggest timeline risk. Porting UK geographic numbers (01/02 prefixes), 03 numbers, and 08x numbers to AWS infrastructure requires coordination between your current carrier, your new SIP carrier, and AWS. The process takes 4 to 12 weeks depending on the carrier and number type.

Freephone 0800 numbers are particularly slow. If your contact centre runs on an 0800 number, start the porting process before you've finished building anything else. Porting can run in parallel with the build.

Also: check whether your Avaya system uses direct SIP trunks or ISDN. ISDN circuits need to be converted to SIP before porting to Amazon Connect is possible. BT Openreach's ISDN switch-off deadline is December 2025. If you're still on ISDN, that's a dependency you need to resolve first.

2. Call Recording Compliance

Under FCA SYSC 10A (MiFID II taping rules) and PCI DSS requirements, call recordings must be retained for specific periods, stored securely, and retrievable on demand. Moving from Avaya Contact Recorder to Amazon S3-based recording means you need to define:

This isn't something you configure on day one and forget. It needs a formal compliance review before go-live. We build this into every regulated-industry deployment we run.

3. Legacy IVR Logic

Avaya IVR trees built over 10 or more years tend to be... archaeological. We've seen contact flows with 47 branches, dead-end paths that haven't been tested since 2019, and routing logic that exists because someone left the business and nobody knows why it was built that way.

Don't migrate your IVR. Redesign it. Use the migration as an opportunity to audit every call path against actual call volume data. In our experience, 60 to 70% of IVR branches handle less than 3% of total call volume. You can eliminate most of them.

The practical step: pull 90 days of Avaya CMS data before you start the build. Map call volumes to each IVR path. Prioritise the top 10 paths that cover 80% of your volume. Build those first.

4. Agent Desktop and CRM Integration

Avaya's agent desktop is deeply embedded in most contact centre workflows. Agents use it for screen-pop, call controls, after-call work codes, and sometimes CRM data entry. Amazon Connect's native agent workspace is clean but minimal.

If your agents are using Salesforce, Connect has a native Salesforce CTI adapter that handles screen-pop and click-to-dial. It works well. If you're on Microsoft Dynamics, there's a certified integration. If you're on a bespoke CRM, you'll need Lambda functions to handle the CTI events and push data to your CRM API.

Budget 2 to 4 weeks of integration work for a non-standard CRM. Don't underestimate this. It's where most custom builds take longer than expected.

5. Workforce Management Handover

If you're using Verint, NICE WFM, or Aspect, your WFM team will need to reconnect their system to Amazon Connect's real-time and historical data feeds. Amazon Connect exposes agent state, queue metrics, and contact data via Kinesis Data Streams and the Connect APIs.

Most WFM vendors have certified Amazon Connect integrations, but they need configuration. Allow 2 to 3 weeks for your WFM vendor to reconfigure their connector and revalidate adherence tracking and scheduling exports.

A Realistic Migration Timeline

Here's what a structured Avaya-to-Connect migration looks like for a 100 to 300 seat UK contact centre:

PhaseDurationWhat Happens
Discovery and auditWeek 1 to 2Call flow audit, CRM integration mapping, compliance review, number inventory
Number porting initiationWeek 1 (parallel)Submit porting requests immediately; this runs in the background
Core Connect buildWeek 2 to 4Contact flows, queues, routing profiles, agent workspace, call recording
CRM and WFM integrationWeek 3 to 5Lambda functions, CTI adapter, WFM connector configuration
Agent trainingWeek 5Train on new desktop, call handling procedures, after-call work
UAT and load testingWeek 5 to 6Simulate peak traffic, test failover, validate recording compliance
CutoverWeek 6DNS and number cutover, parallel running for 48 hours, Avaya decommission plan

Six weeks is achievable for a well-prepared migration. It requires decisions to be made quickly and stakeholders to be available. The migrations that take 6 months are the ones where the compliance team isn't engaged until week 4, or where the CRM integration spec changes twice.

What Amazon Connect Does Better Than Avaya

This isn't a comparison post, but let's be direct about the capability gap.

Real-time transcription and sentiment analysis. Amazon Connect Contact Lens provides live transcription, sentiment scoring, and issue detection during calls. Avaya has no native equivalent. For FCA Consumer Duty compliance, being able to demonstrate that your agents are identifying customer vulnerability in real time is increasingly valuable. Agentic AI voice agents. Amazon Connect integrates natively with Amazon Lex for conversational IVR, and with custom Lambda functions for fully autonomous AI agents that can authenticate callers, retrieve account data, process payments, and resolve queries without agent involvement. We've built agents that handle 43% of inbound call volume autonomously within the first week of production deployment. Elastic scaling. Amazon Connect has no seat licences. You can handle a 10x traffic spike without pre-provisioning capacity. For collections contact centres running seasonal campaigns, or insurers handling claims surges after weather events, this matters. Deployment velocity. New call flows, routing changes, and feature releases can be deployed in minutes via infrastructure-as-code. Avaya changes typically require maintenance windows, vendor involvement, and change management cycles measured in weeks.

What Amazon Connect Does Worse Than Avaya (Be Honest)

Any partner who tells you Amazon Connect is better at everything is selling, not advising.

Outbound dialler capability. Avaya's predictive dialler is mature and battle-tested. Amazon Connect's outbound dialler (via Connect Campaigns) is functional but less sophisticated. If you're running a high-volume predictive dialling operation for debt collections or sales, you'll need to evaluate whether Connect Campaigns meets your needs or whether you need a third-party dialler like Convoso or Five9 integrated via API. Reporting out of the box. Avaya CMS Supervisor has decades of reporting refinement. Amazon Connect's native reporting is good but not as granular on historical queue analytics. Most teams end up building custom dashboards in Amazon QuickSight or exporting data to their BI tool of choice. Budget for this. Voice quality on poor connections. Amazon Connect uses WebRTC for the softphone. On unreliable home broadband connections, agents can experience audio quality issues that Avaya's hardware phones never had. This is a real concern if you have a distributed workforce. Mitigate it with network quality monitoring and clear minimum broadband requirements for home workers.

UK Compliance Considerations You Can't Skip

Data residency. Amazon Connect is available in the eu-west-2 (London) region. All call recordings, contact data, and transcripts should be stored in eu-west-2 to satisfy UK GDPR data residency requirements. Verify that any third-party integrations (WFM, CRM, analytics) also store data within the UK or EEA. FCA Consumer Duty. The FCA's Consumer Duty (effective July 2023) requires firms to demonstrate good outcomes for retail customers. Amazon Connect Contact Lens can generate the audit trail you need: call recordings, transcripts, sentiment scores, and issue flags. Build this into your compliance architecture from day one, not as a retrofit. PCI DSS for card payments. If agents take card payments over the phone, you need pause-and-resume recording during card capture, or a DTMF masking solution. Amazon Connect supports both approaches. This must be tested and documented before go-live if you're in scope for PCI DSS. ICO registration. If you're processing personal data via the contact centre (you are), your ICO registration needs to reflect Amazon Web Services as a data processor. Update your data processing agreements and privacy notices accordingly.

Questions to Ask Any Amazon Connect Migration Partner

Not every AWS partner who says they do Amazon Connect has actually migrated a UK contact centre off Avaya. Ask these:

1. How many Avaya-to-Connect migrations have you completed in the UK specifically?

2. Can you show me a reference from a regulated industry (financial services, insurance, utilities)?

3. How do you handle number porting risk? What's your contingency if porting is delayed past the cutover date?

4. What does your post-go-live support model look like for the first 30 days?

5. How do you handle FCA call recording compliance in your standard build?

If the answers are vague, keep looking.

The Decision You Need to Make Before Starting

Before you engage any partner, you need to answer one internal question: are you migrating to Amazon Connect, or are you transforming your contact centre?

These are different projects with different timelines, budgets, and stakeholder requirements.

A migration gets you off Avaya and onto Connect with equivalent functionality. It reduces platform risk and cost. It takes 4 to 6 weeks for a well-scoped operation.

A transformation adds AI voice agents, autonomous self-service, real-time compliance monitoring, and agentic workflows on top of the migration. It takes longer and costs more, but it's where the real ROI is.

You can do both sequentially. Migrate first, stabilise, then layer in AI capabilities. That's often the right call for large operations with complex change management requirements. For smaller, more agile teams, doing both together is faster and cheaper.

Either way, the migration is the foundation. Get it right.

Ready to Move Off Avaya?

We build Amazon Connect deployments for UK contact centres in regulated industries. We've migrated teams off Avaya Aura and IP Office, built FCA-compliant recording architectures, and deployed AI voice agents that handle real call volume from day one.

If you're evaluating an Avaya migration and want a straight conversation about what it will actually take, Book a discovery call.

Ready to put AI agents into production?

Book a discovery call. We will assess your use case and show you what 4 to 6 weeks to production looks like.

Book a Discovery Call