Each campus has a its own set of reasons to adopt – or not adopt – a new technology. Mobile credential is no different. For Georgia Southern University the decision to go mobile was influenced by a desire to enhance the student experience.

Now we only have the exceptions come in to Card Services, because everybody is just provisioning a mobile credential over the air.

Specifically, administration wanted to improve one of the first experiences new students have on the campus – orientation.

“We'd have 10 or 15 (orientation sessions) over the summer, where we would have 350 to 400 students coming in,” says Richard Wynn, Director of Eagle Card Services.

He explains that they’d queue up to have their photo taken and then wait again for their card to be printed.

There were backups and it was not the best first experience.

In 2020, they moved to online photo submission to improve the process. At that point, they transitioned to mailing cards to incoming students.

“That was still kind of a clumsy process,” he says.

To learn how mobile credential streamlined orientation and how upper administration ultimately got behind the migration, click on the image at the top of this page.

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TRANSCRIPT:

I'm Richard Wynn, Director of Eagle Card Services for Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia.

Georgia Southern is a mobile credential school, and Georgia Southern also made the decision to be a mobile first campus.

The transact products that Georgia Southern University is using include TSE on-premise, cloud POS, of course eAccounts.

One of the big pain points we wanted to solve was student experience.

It blew me away to watch the student use the phone at a door as they were talking on it … not even interrupting the conversation.

Our orientations would happen, we'd have 10 or 15 of them over the summer, where Georgia Southern would have 350 to 400 students coming in, they'd get a photo taken, they'd wait for a minute or so, and then we would issue them their card.

In 2020, when the pandemic happened, we moved to online photo submission, and that changed the way Georgia Southern produced identification cards.

At first, we would mail the physical card to the students after they would send the photo in through online photo submission.

That was still kind of a clumsy process.

So when administration, the Vice President of Business and Finance, saw a video from Mercer that showed their mobile credential, and he contacted me and said, have you seen this?

I said, yes, sir, I have. I've been trying to get you to look at this two or three years now.

He said, we need to have this for our students.

So at that point, I started to put together a project plan, find out what funding was going to be needed for that, and we moved forward with it.

That has changed the way Card Services does business at Georgia Southern.

Now we only have the exceptions come in to Card Services, because everybody is just provisioning a mobile credential over the air.

So the first time I observed walking into one of our residence halls, it blew me away to watch the student use the phone as they were talking on it and just not even interrupting the conversation.

Tap it to the door, continue with their conversation.

Now they're tapping their phone in order to get into our dining services.

It has made entry into our dining services much, much faster. When you had to hand a card to a cashier, it was a little clumsy, and now it happens so fast that it's really created a much better throughput going into our dining services, so it has really made a much better experience for our students.