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In an Up and Down Season, New York Mets Team with Avaya to Build a Connected, Collaborative Work Environment

In describing the fate of the New York Mets on the field in 2018, the cliché used by baseball writers and sportscasters is that it’s been a roller coaster ride. After a sizzling start climbing to the top of the NL East standings at the beginning of the season, the team has experienced dizzying declines, brief upticks and an overall lack of consistency. But there are other areas of the organization where performance levels also started out strong and have remained on an upward curve.

After a successful rollout of the Avaya Aura platform in 2017, the Mets scouted and deployed the Avaya Equinox Experience application for the 2018 season to help establish and nurture a smart, connected team environment in everything from back office operations to media relations to the all-important area of ticket sales. They moved from hardwired lines (the technological equivalent of players still wearing wool flannel uniforms) to a total commitment on mobile communications and enhanced conferencing capabilities. This was accomplished 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.

According to Avaya’s Named Accounts Manager, Liane Levy, who works directly with the Mets, the team had previously been operating on a much older platform which was dated and hadn’t really been kept up to speed. The transition to Aura and more robust adaption of Equinox enabled them to navigate a multi-stage offseason reconstruction of their team operations center with minimal disruption.

The process included relocation of the administration building, replacing cubicles with open-space layouts, and installing sit/stand desks. Using Avaya’s mobile office platform, systems were easy to use and back office team members were able to continue to work efficiently from temporary locations, different sites and at home. “The flexibility of the system allowed them to use soft phones, take advantage of mobility and use feature functionality during the renovation of the office space,” said Levy.

Using Equinox, ticket agents and others can have their desk phone ring through to their mobile devices, take advantage of IM and presence features, and stay in contact with soft phone clients on their PCs when working remotely. To improve collaboration, appropriate team executives are using the solution’s conferencing feature to better communicate with the press. They also conduct internal conferences with large groups and ticket-buying parties, a function which they previously had to rely on an outsourcing company to provide. “They had a smaller conference bridge that didn’t have as much functionality as the Avaya platform,” said Levey

For the loyal but long-suffering fan base, the fan experience starts long before getting to the stadium. It begins with the ticket; the search, purchase, usage of a ticket to a specific game.  According to Chris Zaber, the Mets Vice President of Ticket Sales and Service, 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.  Since the team makes more than 20.000 outbound calls a week to attract ticket buyers, that’s a lot of data to crunch. And in weeks of high-interest games or when the weather is iffy, they receive about the same quantity of inbound calls. Having the capability to analyze data from a business intelligence perspective gives the Mets the tools to develop the right pitches to bring in more fans while creating effective metrics and reporting to deliver a consistently excellent customer experience.

Access to better reporting – when they know and/or can predict peak days or high-volume times-- enables the Mets to scale up to maintain appropriate staff levels of ticket agents. It also allows for a situation when they can plan and respond in real time to handle more questions, more efficiently. For the Mets, this has created an elite collaboration environment where they can plug-in and unplug at will to take full advantage of the benefits of mobile communications.

Levy believes that the Avaya Aura platform and Avaya Equinox Experience have given the Mets an all-star roster of tools, technologies, and solutions in place that respond to individuals’ needs in context. Now if the manager in the dugout could only find a system to make accurate predictions for the most effective pitching change or to bring up the right pinch hitter, the product on the field might improve to meet the performance of the team behind the scenes.