Every day, Sopra Steria provides customer contact services for over three million users. That experience has enabled us to build and run complex services at scale for some of the UK’s largest government organisations, delivering responsive, resilient and trusted services in some of the country’s most highly regulated environments.
Built through millions of interactions, this experience has shaped our approach to innovation. We’ve recently launched Sopra Steria Lumina to bring together the expertise, insight and operational know-how developed through decades of delivering customer contact services at scale. Building on this heritage, Sopra Steria Lumina delivers services in an AI-enabled world, combining our experience and knowledge through an intelligence layer to create transformative operations for real-world scenarios and smarter Customer Experience Management (CXM) services.
The challenge: enhancing customer experience at scale
Organisations delivering high-volume customer support face increasing pressure to provide fast, accessible and consistent service while maintaining security, compliance and operational resilience. Growing demand can leave skilled advisors handling large volumes of routine enquiries, reducing the time available for complex cases that require specialist expertise and judgement.
Meeting these demands requires more than incremental change, and as expectations change, organisations need to rethink how services are designed, delivered and continuously improved.
To address this challenge, Sopra Steria Lumina was designed to improve service accessibility, increase efficiency and enable support teams to focus on higher-value interactions. The solution was not designed around a technology platform. It was designed around the needs of customers and the realities of operating large-scale services for more than three million users.
Decades of customer experience management expertise have given Sopra Steria a deep understanding of how users’ access our services, where demand is created and how these can be continuously improved. This operational knowledge underpins Sopra Steria Lumina, shaping the service design, governance and intelligence that sit at the heart of the solution. PolyAI was selected as the conversational AI technology best suited to enable this vision, providing a natural interface for users while the Sopra Steria Lumina architecture orchestrates and continuously optimises service performance.
The solution: delivering smarter customer experiences
Through Sopra Steria Lumina’s Customer Experience Management (CXM), PolyAI’s conversational AI technology provides natural, intelligent interactions and answers common enquiries without requiring advisor intervention.
Handling 70% of monthly voice calls across human resources, finance and user support helps ensure routine questions like “When is payroll cut-off?” are answered quickly and consistently, while more complex or sensitive issues are seamlessly routed to human advisors. This approach helps ensure users receive the right support at the right time while enabling service teams to focus on situations where human judgement and expertise are paramount such as death in service.
As expectations for faster, more accessible services continue to grow, PolyAI technology helps organisations respond without compromising quality. By providing immediate, consistent answers to common questions, it removes unnecessary waiting, improves access to support and creates a more seamless experience for users.
This has enabled frontline teams to focus their time and expertise on the interactions that require the greatest level of support, preserving human capacity for the moments where it adds the greatest value, allowing advisors to focus on complex and sensitive interactions where empathy, judgement and trust cannot be compromised.
This approach is reflected in a Gartner press release published in February 2026, where Kim Hedlin, Director, Research, Gartner Customer Service & Support, said: "Leaders are not just deploying AI - they are redesigning service models to ensure that technology enhances the customer experience while humans provide context, empathy, and judgment."
Delivering measurable outcomes
The impact extends far beyond automation. Through Sopra Steria Lumina's Customer Experience Management (CXM), organisations gain faster access to trusted information and support, transforming the service experience for both users and advisors.
With PolyAI acting as a key technology enabler, this intelligence-led approach has reduced waiting times, improved accessibility and delivered a more connected, scalable service, while ensuring human expertise remains focused where it matters most.
As Marco Ndrecaj, Director of Customer Experience Management, Sopra Steria, explains:
“Sopra Steria Lumina gives us the opportunity to fundamentally rethink what great customer experience looks like. By bringing together AI, operational expertise and human capability, we remove friction, unlock significant efficiencies and create more responsive, intelligent services at scale. But for me, the real value is how we pursue operational excellence and better customer outcomes at the same time, using AI to free up capacity so our people can focus their expertise to make the greatest difference to the customer.”
Customer Experience Management (CXM), is one example of how Sopra Steria Lumina is put into practice, combining conversational AI, operational insight and human expertise to create smarter, more intuitive experiences that make support faster, simpler and more accessible. This has delivered measurable benefits for both users and service teams, including:
Shaped by decades of operational excellence and designed for an AI-driven future, Sopra Steria Lumina helps organisations move beyond experimentation to embrace purposeful innovation. To learn more about how Sopra Steria Lumina can help transform customer experience, get in touch with our team.