Transact+CBORD has launched CS Gold 9, the latest version of its long-standing campus ID and transaction system used at more than 250 institutions. Designed to streamline administration and boost functionality, the new release integrates artificial intelligence, improves the user interface, and adds customer-driven enhancements.

Steve Swingler, Senior Director of Software Development, says the AI-powered Ask CS Gold feature has generated strong enthusiasm.

Western Connecticut, University of Tennessee Knoxville, and Vanderbilt were the first three schools to go live. It's released. We're quoting to customers. We're ready to do more installs.

“Admins can ask a natural language question through the web interface, and the AI figures out what they're asking for, queries the database, and gives them back an English language response,” he explains.

Early adopters—including Western Connecticut, the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and Vanderbilt—have reported smooth, simple implementations.

Customer feedback guides CS Gold 9 development

Read Winkelman, Vice President and Campus ID Business Leader, emphasizes that client input guided many of the upgrades. “The ten features that got the most votes in our customer ideas portal were included in this release,” he notes. CBORD even credits the contributing campuses by name in the release notes.

The redesign includes new setup wizards, time-saving templates, and a cleaner interface across 16 of the most-used screens—changes aimed at making the system easier to navigate for both experienced and backup administrators.

AI for engagement and insight in CS Gold 9

Beyond administrative convenience, CS Gold 9’s AI capabilities help campuses analyze student engagement.

“Ask a question and say, ‘give me a list of students who haven't used their meal plan more than once a day in the last week,’ and maybe that’s an indicator that they're disengaged,” says Winkelman. “At least a way to start mining that data and look for students who might need some extra connection.”

Feedback from pilot schools has been overwhelmingly positive, with early users calling the upgrade “seamless” and “a win” for simplicity and usability.

To watch the full interview, click the image at the top of this page.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello there, and welcome to this episode of Campus ID News Chats. I'm Chris Corum, your host and publisher of Campus ID News.

Transact+CBORD just released a new version of the long-standing CS Gold platform. We're going to talk today about the new version that was just released with CS Gold 9 with two of the company's leaders.

Welcome Read Winkelman, Vice President and Campus ID Business Leader, and Steve Swingler, Senior Director of Software Development. A little background on the two of them, it’s been 20-plus years with CBORD for both, 30 for Read, and if you add in Steve's time at Diebold, which became a part of CBORD, he's at 30 years too. Both worked on a campus as well.

Chris: So how about a little history of CS Gold before we talk about the new version, when it came out, how many campuses use it, that kind of thing.

Steve: We came out with the first version of CS Gold back in that time that you referred to when we were at Diebold prior to coming over to CBORD. I think that was 1998, and it's grown to over 250 campuses.

It tends to succeed with our larger campuses where the needs are complex, campuses that are doing some very large access control, but we've got a loyal group of customers that give us great feedback, great ideas, and we'll talk in a little bit about some of that feedback that we made part of Gold 9.

Chris: Gold 9, what's new in this version? What was the goal with releasing it? And what did you learn from clients that went into it?

Steve: The one that we get the most comments, questions, and excitement about, I think, is Ask CS Gold. It's an AI chat interface where the admins can ask a natural language question through the web interface of the existing CS Gold web interface, and they ask a question that's on their mind, and the AI figures out what they're asking for, where that might exist in the database, it queries the database, gets the results, and gives them back an English language, natural language response, and the feedback on that has been fantastic.

We've also done some work based on our admins' feedback to save them time in some of the tasks that have been historically more time-consuming, things like building out a meal plan. We've created a new wizard style that gives them some templates from which they can start, so there's some standard templates. There's also the ability to copy an existing meal plan and then tweak that, so some time savers there, some other wizards for the admins, some export utilities.

But I'm real proud of the work the team did to improve the user interface on more than 16 of our most used screens. There's a new look; there's a new cleaner design to it that we're proud of.

Read: I think one of the biggest things, you kind of hit on it, but we have some of the top requested features from customers that they've submitted ideas to us. We have an ideas portal that they can submit ideas in.

The 10 that got the most votes were included in this, and one of the things that I think was pretty is when a new feature is documented in the release notes, the school that submitted that feature as an idea is getting credit right in the release notes. It's not necessarily the person because people move around, but that school is getting credit.

I think that the things Steve talked about in terms of some of the wizards and the ease of use of the user interface, those are nice things, and you think about, well, that's great.

It makes it easier to use, but that's really by design because if you think about the Campus ID industry, we have a lot of customers who frankly are starting to near retirement age, and even those that aren't are looking to be able to take vacations or have sick time. They have to bring in other people who are doing things with the system and doing some system administration, but they don't do it every day, so the easier we can make the system to operate, the easier it is to have somebody cover and back up a regular system administrator, so that was really part of what we were trying to get after with Gold 9 too.

Chris:  One question on the AI thing that you mentioned. Can you give a specific example or two of what someone would ask. When you first said it, I was thinking, you know, what's the weather going to be like today in Tallahassee or something, obviously that's not it, but so what would be a query or something that could be really helpful for a user?

Steve: So you know, one simple example I used just to pick on my boss was I'll ask and show people when was the last time that he went into the office and at what time did he arrive, and you know, make fun of him if he arrived late, but that's just for fun.

You know, you can think of some really complicated questions, and it figures out the answers, so I could ask which locations are doing more than 10% more dollar transactions or number of transactions than they were a month ago, right?

Where am I trending to have the business increase or the same thing with decreases?

You can ask questions to identify students whose activity has declined over a period of time. I can say over a semester, over a month, over a week, and it figures out the complexities of the query, and these are things that we don't naturally have reports in the system to do, but someone on campus will reach out to the card office and say, hey, can you tell me this?

Rather than it being days or weeks long project to figure out how to get a report, they can go type the question and they're getting some remarkably good results.

We had a live demo at a NACCU Near You event in Knoxville. UT Knoxville is one of our beta customers, and now they're live, it's fully released, but they were confident enough in the solution to put it up on the screen live in front of this group of people and type in questions and see it generate the answers, so it's working well for people.

Read: I was just going to say, I think, you know, Steve's point about decline in transaction volume, one of the biggest things that campuses talk about these days is student success and student engagement, and we have all the data in a campus ID system.

Being able to easily ask a question and say, give me a list of students who haven't used their meal plan more than once a day in the last week or some, you know, is that an indicator that they're disengaged?

Maybe, maybe not, but it's at least a way to start mining that data and look for students who might need some extra connection, extra attention.

The other thing that I think it can be really helpful with is I've had, I don't know how many different schools who talk about the fact that students don't always monitor their declining balance funds, and they don't spend it because they're going to the dining hall and they get to the end of the semester and there's all this money backed up that they want to spend.

It's a way to help identify how people are using the system and then proactively reach out to them, whether it's for a student engagement thing or just to make good use of the money. Because kids that eat and kids that sleep do better in school, right.

Chris: Well, you hit on one of my next questions when you said that that UT Knoxville is live. Is CS Gold 9 out of pilot and live at a number of institutions?

Read: Yeah, we, so we had three schools that, and Steve was doing the implementation, so our development team was doing them. Western Connecticut, University of Tennessee Knoxville, and Vanderbilt were the first three schools to go live. They all went live early summer. We wanted to wait till we got through the back-to-school season in a regular load in terms of transactions before considering it generally available, which it is now.

It's released. We're quoting to customers. We're ready to do more installs, but those implementations were very simple. In a couple of the cases, our primary contacts weren't even on campus when we were doing the installations because they didn't need to be.

And since back to school has started, no, no issues whatsoever. Systems have continued to operate really well.

I should also mention Western Connecticut was the first one to go live. UT Knoxville is a mobile credential customer using the, the Allegiant flavor of mobile credential and Vanderbilt is also mobile using the HID flavor and Vanderbilt has some biometrics tied in. We feel like we've really tested all the various use cases that we could have with those three customers.

Chris: You mentioned that it was an easy implementation, but for the next Gold customer that wants to go to version 9, what is the implementation process actually look like?

Steve: If they're familiar with past upgrade exercises, for example if they went from CS Gold 6 to CS Gold 7 or CS Gold 8, it's very similar. Depending on the size and complexity of their system, you know, the downtime will vary significantly. But one thing is there is not a major database version change in this one, so that actually saves some time in most cases. There's no database conversion required.

Chris: I assume since the two companies came together that Transact releases might have some ties to see previous CBORD clients or products and back and forth. Are there some new things in Gold that tie to some of the Transact products?

Read: Yeah, we're doing a couple of things. One is, as you might imagine, all of the devices around the perimeter of the core system – so point of sale, access control – we're looking to make those as consistent across all the products as possible. So, when a customer wants to move from gold to, to IDX, they're ready.

But we've got CS gold customers that are currently implemented with our cloud point of sale solution, which is a Transact point of sale solution that we've had for a while that includes mobile ordering.

We've also taken our CS Access portion of CS Gold and we're live with an integration to TSE, which is a Transact campus ID system, the predecessor of IDX that's live now as well.

So yeah, absolutely. We're looking to tie things together so that when a customer wants to move to IDX, they're ready because all of those tie ins are already set up.

We're not trying to push anybody to move, but we want them to move when they see the feature and the value that makes them want to move.

Chris: Any client feedback that stands out like from the early three, I'm sure it's all good, but is there something that makes you, that made you go, wow, this is, this is great to hear?

Read: Rebecca at Western Connecticut keeps sending us emails of feedback she's got from people that interact with the system that are just sort of giddy about how easy it is to use. She's called it a win. Knoxville the upgrade was simple. Vanderbilt called it a seamless transition. It’s hard to ask for anything better than that. I think people are happy with the functionality and getting value out of it.

Steve: Sometimes it's the little things. We added a real simple export button to the patron groups interface. That was requested somewhere along the way and we thought, okay, well, that's, that's not too hard to do.

Rebecca showed that to a group of RAs for the first time and they were just elated. Now, you can imagine there's some patron groups associated with residents in a particular building and to be able to just download that list and use it however they want to use it was an exciting new feature for them.

I never imagined that that would excite anyone.

Chris: If somebody wants to learn more about CS Gold 9 or an existing customer wants to talk about upgrades, where do they reach out?

Read: Best process is to talk to their account executive. If they don't know who that is, my email address is CRW at CBORD.com. I'm happy to field anything. But if contact your AE, you'll get probably a faster response and a little more detailed as well.

Chris: Read, Steve, thanks so much for joining us and filling us in on the latest and greatest with the new version and to all those folks listening or watching or whatever you want to call it.

As always, I appreciate you being here and if you have any suggestions for a future episode of Campus ID News chats, shoot me a note at chris at campusidnews.com.