The New York Mets have partnered with RingCentral to enhance both its internal experience and fan engagement.
On Tuesday, the cloud communications platform provider was selected by the baseball franchise to replace its legacy on-premises system with its cloud communications platform, ensuring modernized, more connected communications.
The state of global fan engagement has shifted dramatically recently, as more sports organizations look beyond matchday interactions to build more continuous, personalized fan relationships.
Oscar Fernandez, Senior Vice President of Technology for the New York Mets, said the partnership reflects the franchise’s ambition to strengthen both fan connections and internal collaboration.
“Our goal is to be the most fan-friendly and technology-driven organization in baseball, and that means continually investing in tools that strengthen how we connect with our fans and one another,” he said.
“RingCentral provides a flexible, scalable communications platform that will help our sales team engage more fans while supporting greater collaboration across the organization.”
How the Mets are Moving Beyond Legacy Limitations
This partnership aims to connect the Mets 800 employees through one cloud-based platform while giving sales teams more ways to act within fan interests.
By introducing RingEX, this system will provide the day-to-day business communications for the franchise, intending to reduce the operational limitations associated with on-prem infrastructure.
With these systems often offering limited scalability when adding capacity, this can be difficult for organizations navigating fluctuating demands around game days and ticket campaigns.
For distributed employees, on-prem systems can make consistent communications across locations and devices harder to ensure, as separated systems and channels can create duplicated work and limited visibility.
Furthermore, introducing modern APIs and integrations can be more difficult with legacy phone systems designed before CRM, AI, and engagement tools.
To ensure quick, time-sensitive responses, organizations must be able to continue a conversation across channels, improve visibility over communications activity, and make it easier to support changing business requirements.
Fernandez noted:
“It’s open-platform approach and compatibility with our existing technology environment will help streamline workflows, improve visibility and allow us to operate more efficiently.”
This phone transformation aims to help sales teams call and text fan leads at greater scale with unlimited toll-free and outbound calling.
By becoming a more fan-friendly and technology-driven baseball organization, this partnership will not only to process more sales opportunities but make each interaction more personal and responsive.
For sales teams, introducing better tools for calling and messaging could allow them to reach more leads proactively and personally, while clearer workflows and reporting can uncover missed opportunities.
RingCentral’s integrated platform combines business phone, SMS and contact-centre capabilities, alongside native Microsoft integrations and an open-platform approach that can fit into the Mets’ existing technology environment.
Furthermore, the partnership includes Advanced Support, giving the club dedicated assistance as it deploys and scales both RingEX and RingCX.
By creating a modern communications backbone for the sports franchise, this gives its sales teams greater capacity and visibility and its marketers to deliver quicker, more relevant fan engagement.
The State of Fan Engagement in 2026
In 2026, fan engagement across global sports organizations is shifting toward always-on, personalized and increasingly conversational relationships, using cloud platforms, unified data, and AI to connect fans and engagement activity more directly with support and loyalty outcomes.
Whilst the New York Mets are not reportedly going down the AI-agent-led engagement route seen elsewhere, its plan to call and text fan leads while bringing 800 employees onto a common communications system creates the operational base for faster, more consistent fan contact.
Many examples across the year are following this fan engagement trend, with Formula 1’s Salesforce-powered fan agent designed to bring fans closer to the sport 365 days a year.
In a previous interview with CX Today, Derek Slager, Co-Founder and CTO of Amperity, warned that sports organizations cannot realistically create a unified view of the fan when data remains spread across dozens of disconnected systems.
He explained:
“It’s super unrealistic that somebody in their spare time is able to comprehensively bring together data from 20 different systems, put that all into a well-vetted fan 360, and then make great business decisions on top of that.”
Many sports organizations have also introduced data-driven personalization, with Liverpool using SAS to unify web, mobile and social data for an optimized, personalized journey with merchandise recommendations and fan-behaviour modelling.
Furthermore, F1’s agent draws on more than 100 trusted sources, adapts to fan interests and autonomously handles 80% of queries, reducing chat handling time by 30%.
Finally, conversational, low-friction access has been introduced by companies such as Infobip, using its PitchMate and RaceMate to bring live data and tailored content into WhatsApp, RCS and Apple Messages.
TikTok’s NBA and WNBA partnership also uses social discovery into encourage live viewing, with GamePlan having generated 497 million impressions during the 2026 NBA Finals and more than 426,000 Tap to Watch referrals.
For CX leaders, the priority to ensure competitive edge is to treat fan engagement as a connected, ongoing journey that builds lasting loyalty.
