VSP Vision Care Sees Satisfaction
Soar When Clients Use Single Sign-On

The Objective

VSP Vision Care serves approximately 57 million members. That impressive number makes VSP the largest vision benefits company in the United States. VSP has a network of 28,000 private-practice doctors and contracts with 40,000 client organizations, including more than 100 health plans.

One of VSP’s biggest global insurance clients asked for secure single sign-on (SSO) into vsp.com, the web portal that serves all of VSP’s clients and benefits managers. The company began investigating SSO solutions right away, looking for a robust and affordable solution that would serve the company now and into the future. VSP realized that down the road, more and more of its larger clients would be asking for SSO support. The company needed a way to make plan and benefits administration easier and extend clients’ positive experiences on its site.

The Challenge

VSP lacked an SSO solution that would allow clients to securely and easily log on to its web portal. The solution had to be able to interoperate with many different flavors of SSO, from home-grown to SAML 2.0-based solutions. In addition, the company required a solution that would lead to greater client satisfaction, longer visits to the site by users, and fewer login support calls. And, the VSP portal was growing and needed broad capabilities that would allow additions to its features in the future.

The Solution

VSP chose PingFederate to provide its clients with secure and seamless SSO access at vsp.com. At first the company considered in-house development, IBM Tivoli, and solutions from identity management vendors such as Ping Identity. VSP decided on Ping Identity because of the company’s market reach and the maximum ease of integration with other environments.

Whether a VSP client group uses a single username and password or a complex authentication scenario, PingFederate offers an array of easy integration kits for all standard identity protocols. “PingFederate is legendary for its ability to work with a wide variety of existing environments,” said VSP IT Manager Gary Lunsford

VSP liked the way that PingFederate gave it the option to use established social identities to register and connect users to portal apps. “Ping Identity offers Cloud Identity Connectors that install with PingFederate,” said Lunsford. “To make our site registration and access easier for users and to further cut down on call-center contacts, sometime in the future we’ll likely offer this capability as well.”