How Sopra Steria is using AI to scale customer service

Smiling customer service agent, gesturing while speaking to a customer, with colleagues working alongside.

Nearly half (47%) of consumers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa say they would switch brands after just one poor or slow service experience, according to ServiceNow's latest customer experience (CX) research..

Fast, accurate solutions to customer problems are critical. But for many organisations, the challenge lies in scaling high-touch services without an ever-expanding headcount. ServiceNow customer and Elite Partner Sopra Steria has found a way to use AI to scale customer service.

The journey to better knowledge work

Sopra Steria’s managed services help businesses in nearly 30 countries become more competitive by implementing innovative technologies, such as AI.

To grow in a crowded market, Sopra Steria needed to elevate its customer experience further. Leaders wanted to onboard more clients more efficiently, without continuously growing the size of the support department.

The customer service team explored the capabilities of AI-driven platforms to help standardise knowledge processes and streamline customer service management (CSM). They trialled AI features on the ServiceNow AI Platform.

Simon Midtvedt, ServiceNow manager at Sopra Steria, says, “We wanted to explore all the new AI functionality in ServiceNow so we could both try it out ourselves and pass it forward to our customers in the consulting process.”

The impacts of AI in CSM

Sopra Steria uses the ServiceNow AI Platform to fuel a knowledge-driven approach to service and drive more efficient incident resolution. AI automatically:

AI-enabled workflows help human service agents find the right solution to a customer request, respond to the customer in a more timely manner, and resolve cases faster.

Sopra Steria has also deployed ServiceNow AI Agents to classify interactions and route inbound emails to the correct team, reducing manual triage effort. It’s helped the company significantly increase the number of incidents that can progress through the workflow automatically. automatically.

Grete Johansen, a manager at Sopra Steria, says, “The interaction classification agent can read emails and universal requests, automatically generate incidents, and suggest what catalogue item to use. Half the emails that come in are incidents, so that process helps agents solve tickets faster.”

More streamlined interactions have increased Sopra Steria’s customer satisfaction by 10% over the last year.

Sopra Steria has also updated its working practices to embed AI into everyday service delivery. It’s now mandatory for service technicians to attach knowledge base articles each time they solve a ticket, helping signpost the resolution to highly specialised challenges. A more connected and enriched knowledge base has cut the average time to train new service agents in half.

Scaling AI across systems

Sopra Steria continues to iterate and improve how AI supports CSM, using Platform Analytics to monitor AI agents and track knowledge base growth. With these insights, the company is refining processes and incorporating new features to enhance knowledge work.

For example, the team recently added a question-and-answer tool to the platform, enabling faster ticket resolution and documentation access for internal and external users.

Sopra Steria’s next goal is to build a platform that combines ServiceNow AI Agents with AI agents from other systems. Midtvedt explains, “We’ve already seen the effect of AI agents for incident summarisation, incident classification, and knowledge generation. Next, we want to integrate more agents across systems to build a multi-agent environment.”

Sopra Steria hopes this network of AI agents, its digital workforce, will enable employees to focus on high-value work. By using the ServiceNow AI Platform to consolidate AI agents, end-user processes, and system integrations, the organisation has built a scalable CSM function that delivers superior customer experience.

Find out how ServiceNow can help you put AI to work for customer service.