The Objective

Headquartered in Alaska with additional locations throughout the U.S., GCI provides communication and technology services to some of the most remote communities and in some of the most challenging conditions in North America. The company is known for its pioneering efforts in cable telephone and commercial services.

GCI launched a company-wide initiative to improve the customer experience for their subscribers. Internally, they also wanted to increase productivity and support modern applications for their employee base.

The Challenge

The telecom company offers customers wireless, internet, cable TV, and landline services to their subscribers, and integrations with several external partners allow their customers to access additional services like HBO Go and Showtime.

Customers had multiple identity profiles across a plethora of apps, including the GCI customer portal, billing system, and TV services. GCI sought to eliminate the disjointed customer experience and create one profile, username, and password to rule customer access to their various services.

The Solution

After an evaluation of several vendors, GCI selected Ping Identity for their fast deployment, extensive integration capabilities, and identity thought leadership.

First, the organization implemented PingFederate and PingAccess for internal users, giving their 2,500 employees any time, anywhere access to all of the resources they need. “The deployment of PingFederate was very slick,” said Kesler. Once GCI integrated PingFederate with their Active Directory and various applications, application owners across the enterprise responded enthusiastically. Access management capabilities provide centralized policies and session management across web, mobile, and APIs.

Next, the GCI team tackled the customer identity initiative. PingFederate and PingAccess were also able to provide single sign-on (SSO) and access management for GCI’s customers. GCI has an identity data store for their customers’ system-independent identities, which includes a Universally Unique Identifier (UUID), username, and password hash. A separate data store holds each system’s specific identity attributes, which are linked to the independent identity via the UUID. Customer attributes from the billing system are used to federate into other applications, giving them a consistent login experience to all of GCI’s digital properties.

Ping underpins GCI’s digital customer experience—from registration and identity credentialing all the way through to login, sign-on, and access to services.