New York Mets Turn to Avaya for Smart Connected Team Office at Citi Field

When it comes to starting the season strong, the New York Mets are in a league of their own. It’s innovative clubs like the Mets, leveraging Avaya’s 21st-century technology and solutions, that create smart connected team environments that put them in scoring position. At the beginning of every season, your players must be ready, your coaches prepared, your staff informed, your operations up and running, and your fans rearing to go.

The beginning of a new season isn’t just about opening day and the upcoming rival team matchups, it’s about the whole season that is Major League Baseball — all 162 games of it. With 81 home games to fill the 41,922 seats at Citi Field, the entire network of people, places, and things that make up the ballpark must be connected and optimized to deliver a winning fan experience.

Running on a mobile communications platform, Citi Field is on the bleeding edge of stadiums of the future, where responsive workplaces and scalable technology make the physical and digital environments smarter and adaptable to variable operational workflows. Mobility endpoints map back to a robust communications infrastructure that enables teams to stay up to speed by connecting them to each other and to the fans across operations, ticketing, concessions, and so on.

After a successful roll-out of the Avaya Aura Platform in 2017, the team scouted and deployed the Avaya Equinox Experience for the 2018 season to ensure smooth integration and seamless device-to-device agility for improving everything in and around the stadium — from getting geared up for opening day to selling out tickets.

As the Mets prepped for this season, they took on the task of retrofitting their back office to create a more collaborative work environment, improve team communications, and the overall club-to-customer experience. The reconstruction of their team operations center took on multiple stages including the relocation of the administration building, replacing cubicles with open-space layouts, and installing sit/stand desks that increase team transparency and boost office energy.

With Avaya’s mobile office platform experience, the Mets office team temporarily moved into other spaces around the stadium while specific areas were being renovated without disrupting their workflows. Team productivity stayed up, systems were easy to use, and speeds were fast—all of which helped them get ready for opening day.

In addition to the office remodel and hardscaping, the Mets planned for increasing contextual awareness across communication channels in the organization, which impacts the staff, operations, and fans. They moved from hardwired lines to a complete mobile mindset and enhanced conferencing capabilities by upgrading their system and allowing for more than 150 concurrent users (not including a bridge provisioned for media to make strategy calls on a secure, reliable network). This flexibility and scalability “keeps us in touch with the organization moving forward. I can pick up a call and continue a conversation without having to sift through voicemail,” says Tom Festa, VP, Technology at New York Mets.

But what goes into a call, or on-point communications? Well we know the fan experience starts long before getting to the stadium. It begins with the ticket. The search, purchase, usage of your ticket to the game. Echoing this, VP, Ticket Sales & Services, Chris Zaber comments, “Whatever we can do to be more efficient is of huge value to us. Installing the new Avaya product helps us do that.”

As such, the ticketing team was looking for more efficient ways to pull data and look at it, instilling better call tracking from number of calls made, to drop-out numbers, and average talk time. “By getting a breakdown by day to see efficiencies, trends, etc., we can dig into information regarding activity of a rep or client, and pull that data right at our fingertips,” Zaber says. Using this data to refine and optimize team and customer experiences is a huge win for pro sports teams that are running clubs in a smart connected world.

With more than 20,000 outbound calls per week, there is certainly a lot of data to leverage. Conversely the week of high traffic games or inclement weather, inbound calls can reach us much as 20,000 in a week. Being able to analyze information from a business intelligence side of the house gives the Mets the tools they need for a quality at-bat against those that matter the most — the fans! “The access we have into the raw data allows us to better create metrics and devise reports for customer experience,” says John Morris, Executive Director, Business Intelligence & Analytics for the Mets.

Access to better reporting enables better staffing, which hopefully will lead to better customer experiences. When you know and/or can predict peak days or high-volume times, you can plan and respond in real time to handle more questions, more efficiently. For the Mets, this has created an elite team experience and collaboration environment where they can plug-in and unplug through the advantage of mobile communications, which was especially mission critical during the office remodeling phase.

With everyone and everything communicating with each other, the New York Mets have an all-star roster of tools, technologies, and solutions in place that respond to individuals’ needs in context. People, places, and things that can communicate with other objects help to create a network that is viable for smart connected stadiums of the future. The Mets back office is our early-season hero. #LGM #AvayaSports