Cleveland Guardians' new cloud phone system saves IT 20 to 30 hours a week

Game days used to bring trouble on the Cleveland Guardians' phone lines. The Major League Baseball club's legacy on-premises phone system was struggling to keep up, and on game days high call volumes often meant slow response times, a growing source of frustration for fans. Keeping the system running also stretched resources, and the IT team spent more time maintaining outdated infrastructure than working on anything new. That's according to a case study by Lindsay James, published 30 October 2026 in Technology Record.

To fix it, the Guardians brought in TTx, a full-service IT provider and longtime IT partner, to source, implement and manage a replacement. TTx recommended Maven Cloud, its AI-powered cloud communications solution. Maven Cloud runs on Intermedia's communications platform and covers voice, video conferencing, messaging, file sharing and contact center capabilities. It integrated with the Guardians' existing Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 environment.

The most concrete number belongs to the IT staff. The club reports saving 20 to 30 hours of IT time a week, hours that used to go into keeping old infrastructure running. The contact center also turned out to be a trial run. The Guardians are now rolling out Maven Cloud for their broader unified communications needs.

The club set three requirements: support for remote work, less IT complexity, and insights that would help it improve the fan experience. Whitney Kuszmaul, head of IT for Cleveland Guardians, said the organisation moves quickly and required a phone system able to match that pace. Each requirement lines up with a different part of the result, and the order in which they paid off shows how fixing the phones turned into a platform decision.

Routing fans to the right desk

The contact center handles ticketing questions, season-ticket services and general customer service. Under the new setup, intelligent call routing quickly sends each fan to the right ticketing or service rep. The system can also scale as staffing rises and falls through the year, covering Spring Training, the playoffs and the busiest game-day surges.

That scaling matters more for a ballclub than for a typical office. The case study names three separate peaks, and each brings a different staffing level, so a fixed-capacity system would be oversized in quiet months and squeezed at the peaks. On the agent side, the case study reports that contact center staff now get crystal-clear call quality, a small detail that counts on a loud game day.

The Dynamics 365 link does quieter work. Pairing CRM synchronization and screen-pops with AI-powered analytics gives staff real-time insight into how fans interact with the club, so service can be more personalized. The old setup gave the club little data on engagement or service quality, so the staff struggled to measure the fan experience at all, let alone improve it.

Hours back on the IT calendar

The rollout was light. According to the case study, deployment took under five hours of IT oversight, staff needed only minimal training, and people adopted the system quickly. Kuszmaul said the goal was a simple, scalable, reliable system so the team could focus on baseball and fans instead of managing infrastructure. The case study credits the fully managed cloud model with significantly reducing the constraints and risks that came with the legacy infrastructure.

The Guardians' most concrete result is measured in the IT team's own calendar: 20 to 30 hours a week no longer spent keeping an old phone system alive. Based on a 40-hour week, that works out to roughly half to three-quarters of one full-time person. That's simple arithmetic on the club's range, not a figure the club reported. For a sports team's IT department, that's a big share of its working week.

The case study frames those hours as time freed for innovation rather than infrastructure management. That reads as redeploying staff, not cutting jobs, so the payoff depends on what the team builds with the time.

There's a fair objection. Those hours didn't vanish. Because TTx and Intermedia fully manage the platform, part of what the Guardians bought is someone else's maintenance time. For a CIO weighing the same move, the weekly figure is best read as internal capacity freed up by a managed contract. It only means something next to the cost of that contract, which the case study doesn't publish, and the write-up gives no before-and-after hold times either.

From the ticket line to the front office

Remote work had been a sore point too. During stadium renovations, staff needed reliable access from wherever they were, and the old system offered little of it. Team members can now work from anywhere, whether from home, the ballpark or on the road. The case study says communication has become more reliable and productivity has risen across the organization. It adds that the mobile app's expanded capabilities have increased adoption among management and staff.

Next, the club plans to bring business phone, team messaging, video conferencing and collaboration tools together on one platform, linking coaches, front-office personnel and mobile staff. This expansion follows the success of the contact centre transformation. The stated aim is to replace fragmented systems with a single cloud-based one. For organizations already running on Teams, that sequence suggests a lower-risk path: prove the system in one operation first, then roll the platform outward.

The mobile adoption figure may be the most useful early signal for that next phase. Managers are among the people the wider rollout has to reach, and they already use the app. Kuszmaul was blunt about the partner. According to Kuszmaul, the club trusted TTx to find the best solution and TTx came through. Kuszmaul added that Maven Cloud now gives the club a dependable system, so staff can put their attention on the team and the fans instead of on outdated technology.

Seasonal rushes like Spring Training could show how well the wider rollout holds up once coaches, front office and contact center all work on one platform.

Why the fan line deserves the attention

There's also a reason to think the fan-facing side matters beyond IT efficiency. Researchers led by Marko Sarstedt built a fan satisfaction index from an empirical study of soccer fans. They then tested it on a second sample of soccer fans and used it to predict attendance. Their results imply that three factors weigh most heavily on fan satisfaction: features of the stadium, the way the club is managed, and the club's fan-based support.

The study covered soccer, not baseball. Still, club management is the factor a front office controls directly, and you could argue that how quickly a season-ticket holder gets a real answer falls under it. The authors, who called their measure the FANSAT index and analyzed it with partial least squares structural equation modeling, make a related argument. People running sporting events, they write, cannot rely only on what is integral to the sport and should also work on the parts they can influence directly.

Their literature review shows why that has a financial side. Earlier studies they cite tie fan satisfaction to attendance, intentions to return and loyalty, and the authors note that ticket sales make up a major proportion of club revenue. They also point to anecdotal evidence that the sporting industry increasingly focuses on fans who want personalized experiences. That is the use case the Guardians describe for Dynamics 365 screen-pops and analytics.

The phone line can also earn money, not just answer questions. At the University of South Florida, senior associate AD Andrew Goodrich told AthleticDirectorU that one of the department's most effective upsell programs involved calling holders of its Boundless Bulls ten-ticket digital voucher mini-plan who had already used tickets. The main purpose of each call was to confirm the fan was having a fantastic game-day experience. Sales reps then encouraged them to order tickets for future games.

That's college football, not MLB, but it suggests the kind of call where having the fan's account on screen from the first ring would pay off. It also brings the Guardians' old data gap back into focus. A club that struggled to measure the fan experience now has real-time interaction analytics in its CRM, the raw material for testing whether faster, more personal service moves the satisfaction measures researchers link to attendance.