Matt: Hello, and welcome to the CX Coffee Chat. I’m your host, Matt from Concentrix. I’m the Managing Director for The Nest here in the UK. Today, we’re very fortunate to be joined by Ismail. Ismail, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I’m interested to talk about you and your role, so why don’t we kick off, if you don’t mind, by giving our audience a brief introduction to yourself, your role, and the company you work for?
Ismail: Of course. Thank you, and it is a pleasure to be here. I am looking forward to an insightful conversation. I am the VP of Operations at Epos Now, a UK-based software provider headquartered in Norwich. The company was founded in 2011 by Jacyn Heavens. Epos Now is a platform for small and medium-sized businesses, providing software, services, and hardware that help merchants configure products, make sales, process payments, and access embedded financial services. Our customers include local retailers, pubs, and other community businesses. We now support more than 90,000 locations across 11 countries and continue to scale year after year.
How Operations Has Evolved
Matt: Today, we are exploring what it takes to run operations in a scaling environment. Epos Now supports more than 90,000 locations worldwide, while customer expectations, operational complexity, and pressure on efficiency continue to rise. What makes the business particularly interesting is that it is bootstrapped and self-funded, so every investment has to be carefully considered. What does operations look like at Epos Now today?
Ismail: Yeah, absolutely. Of course. I think we have to go a little bit back and think about what operations used to look like back in the day. Realistically, it was the central cog of businesses, connecting the dots and governing processes. I think that worked. But as businesses continue to scale digitally, and now especially with a lot of innovation taking place around AI, operations is changing. Operations is focusing not just on operational excellence, but on becoming that generalist area of the business where, if something is done and it’s done quickly, efficiently, and scalably, operations touches it one way or another. And like I said, we now continue to experience that on a daily basis. We have 150 million annual turnover in USD and are still entirely self-funded. The pockets have to be very cautiously measured. And every decision that we take, every spend that we plan, needs to have a very well-calculated ROI that either goes towards operational efficiency or, more importantly, serving merchants, which I think as a business we do very well. We put everything that we do towards the aim of focusing on and supporting our merchants, whether that’s our operational processes or our product development itself. We pride ourselves, like I said, on being the operational infrastructure for these SMEs. And we see entrepreneurs very frequently choosing us as their platform of choice, which I find very rewarding, especially as entrepreneurs in the UK and worldwide really trust us to help get their businesses off the ground. The services, the tools, and the business processes that we set up in the background have to support that. We have to be robust, we have to be there when you need us, and we have to provide you with a service that is customizable enough to fit your business and your business needs. But bringing us back to operations, like you said, it’s changed, especially over the course of the last couple of years. It’s become a lot more generalist and focused on excellence, not just churning people internally. Right?
Operations as the Centre of the Business
Matt: It’s a good point that you made about operations. It’s no longer just about delivering and keeping those cogs turning across things like gross margin and experience. So, in your role as an operations leader, what are you doing differently? Where are you spending your time now that you wouldn’t have in the past?
Ismail: I think working more closely with the teams that deliver the outcomes. Previously, each one of those teams would have had an almost dedicated siloed environment that operated in its own little structure, connected through process or systems, one way or another, to operations in the business. I’ve been working closely with them and being able to understand in a lot more detail how it all fits together. I think the one thing that hasn’t changed about operations is that it continues to sit at the centre of the business. It has to make sure, and continue to make sure, that whatever happens at the front end of the funnel, the journey for the customers and the processes internally continue to remain standardised, governed, and executed as the business needs, to ensure the delivery of business strategy. So working very closely with the teams on the ground floor, from our service teams to our implementation teams and even our finance team, and making sure that every step of the journey that we touch with our customer has some level of oversight, or insight, through the value lens of operations is essential. That paints a picture not just from an operational excellence point of view, where you’re able to connect the dots a little bit better, but also to understand what doesn’t work. You need that bird’s-eye view to understand when a process works great in a silo. It works great for the support team, as an example. They’re able to execute everything they need to. But what happens in finance? What about logistics? What about the feedback that we need for our product teams and development teams to improve the products and services we offer? All of that has to come together, and especially recently, it’s becoming more and more frequent among peers out there that this responsibility starts to sit with operations.
Connecting Teams, Systems and Customer Data
Matt: Okay. So I’m interested in digging into a couple of those areas, because that’s quite a shift. Going back to the difference between operations back then and today, I think the way that you’re framing it is that operations is the core of the business, almost like a living, breathing organism, where it’s not a case of the back office, like finance, or product teams creating something and you then just dealing with the customers. That feedback loop between your product team and your finance team is very interesting, and how it is all working together. Customer success and how you can change strategy is interesting too. How does that work for you in terms of creating that feedback loop, so that the conversations you’re having and the things you’re learning through operations are fed back to the product team, the finance team, your sales team, marketing team, and every other part of the business? I think that’s something that a lot of companies struggle with: actually making sure that you can cascade all of that information to close that feedback loop. How do you make that happen in your business?
Ismail: It’s a very deep question to answer, and it is ultimately very subjective based on the business’s current operational infrastructure, as I like to call it. I think this is where operations sits slightly outside just executing the core operational responsibilities. We’re talking logistics and the basics, but also ensuring that you have that operations brain in the central business: the platform that allows you to connect the dots. And I think, having worked in other businesses where this was missing, that presents challenges and creates silos. For example, you might have a CRM platform specifically designed for sales and marketing to work efficiently together because their relationship has to be close to ensure maximum efficiency and, obviously, the lead-to-customer journey being as frictionless as possible. But what tends to happen afterwards is that the journey ends there, and there’s a hand-off to a different system, very likely an ERP system somewhere, or a set of spreadsheets. In some instances, that creates siloed data, which makes connecting the dots a lot more difficult. One thing we’ve done very well at Epos Now is centralise all of that infrastructure into one platform, being able to connect our marketing team to our sales team, our sales team to our operations team, and our customer success team. Retrospectively, having the ability to see the back-office infrastructure of our own merchants and being able to connect everything through data, transforming raw data into insights that suit the area of the business that needs to work on that information, but more importantly, creating something that we like to call the customer profile, or the account profile. Every step of the journey that takes place, whether that’s from marketing all the way to, unfortunately, sometimes exit, is connected to a single profile that we utilise on our platform. That allows our teams to focus on the journey, and also respond to the part of the journey that they need to work on for that customer. Simultaneously, other areas of the business are able to still see and rely on that insight to improve their efficiencies. And to give you an example here, like we briefly touched on, there is that feedback loop between our support team and our product and development teams. Support uses a CRM that creates cases and manages customer interactions. We’ve built such a robust customer profile that all of that feedback gets documented and is accessible quickly to our product teams, so they can find insight on the major topics or conversations that are taking place. We’re now able, with the power of AI, to produce augmented insights that look deeper beyond the category selection on a case record, for example, and into customer sentiment. Putting all of these touchpoints together into an operational infrastructure, ideally one platform, which is what we’ve been able to achieve, makes the role of operations in the current day and age, where data is more valuable than gold, very valuable.
Building an Open and Collaborative Culture
Matt: I think essential is an interesting way to approach it, and it sounds like the system set-up, the processes, and the system strategy are taking the real lead here and allowing the people in your business, or any automation efforts that you’re doing, to focus on what they’re good at. Something interesting is that everyone talks about efficiency, automation, and AI today. And I think one of the challenges is around eroding any culture and engagement that it has. It sounds like that’s something that’s very deeply embedded in your business, right? You’ve got this culture of holistic feedback loops and constant improvement. How do you manage that from a cultural perspective and with your people? Is there anything that you do differently in your business that allows you to create that culture?
Ismail: Yeah, no, of course. I’ll be honest, it is a challenge, but I think it’s a challenge that we’re handling very well as a global business. We operate from four major locations: our headquarters here in Norwich, UK, plus Florida, Australia, and more recently Bulgaria, where some of our development is based. That, coupled with some remote workforce today across multiple time zones, means that, as you can imagine, culture is a major focus for the business. One thing that we’ve discovered is the value of open-forum conversation. People can only do good work when they know what good work looks like, and, at the same time, what poor work looks like. We pride ourselves on being fully transparent with all of our teams. All of our teams have direct access to the senior leadership team in the business, where conversations can take place. We utilise Slack as our platform of choice here, which allows us to set up either dedicated channels that focus on a specific topic or area of the business, or bring people together when they need to be together. And I’m more than pleased to share that the majority of our internal channels are public channels, meaning that the right person, even if something is not part of their role and responsibilities, can get involved in projects that sit outside of their scope. That gives them exposure, the ability to learn something new, and, at the same time, develop their career. We are very fortunate that, when I look at our product team as an example, many of our junior through to senior product developers are actually internal progressions from our service teams. Our culture focuses on being able to empower our teams with information, knowledge, and exposure. More importantly, all those areas of the business have opened doors for them that previously might have been closed through conventional methods of applying for different roles. We see a lot of cross-departmental moves internally, not just progression within the same area they are normally working in, but cross-departmental moves as well.
Protecting Culture While Scaling
Matt: Got it. And scaling is usually where things start to break and the cracks in the model can appear. Have you witnessed that as your business has grown, while having that kind of openness, open-forum, collaborative mindset? Have there been any challenges or difficult decisions as your business has grown? I guess the question is: have you noticed the culture change at all as the business has grown, and have you done anything to retain that culture?
Ismail: I’ll be honest, like any business, there will be some instances where there is a bad apple. Unfortunately, it’s just how the world works, right? Ultimately, there will sometimes be challenges where the strategy simply does not fit with the stakeholder in question. But I think our continuous emphasis on being open and transparent, more importantly with the individual about what went wrong, and putting robust plans in place to ensure that they understand and can take action on the back of the feedback, means they are given the opportunity to do so. But in the instances where it’s simply not working, we ensure that we follow the correct processes and retain the culture within the business. Our focus to date, like you said, is that we’re still an entirely bootstrapped business. We take every single decision, including hiring decisions, very conservatively. We ensure that we not only find a fit for the role in terms of skills, but a fit for the culture and a fit for the business, where that individual can flourish with the journey. In some instances, we may even overlook some of the skill requirements. But if the cultural fit is there and the willingness to learn is there, our business empowers individuals to essentially achieve that. Like I said, the ability to access knowledge on demand and the ability to get exposed to projects outside of your scope is very attractive to the right people, which I’m proud to say we seem to have been attracting for the last 11 years to date. Having worked in major enterprises before, I still find it very fascinating how, as a business, we continue to operate at such a massive scale with such a level of efficiency.
AI and Automation in Operations
Matt: Got it. Thank you. So I want to change lane slightly, because everyone in this day and age wants to talk about AI, automation, and technology advancements in operations. Everyone’s hungry to hear use cases, examples, and opinions on where it’s actually making an impact. From your experience in your organisation right now, what are you focused on today for implementing AI and automation? And specifically, what problems are you looking to solve with new technology?
Ismail: Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, AI is the hot topic out there. So every business, and likely everyone listening to the podcast today, will want to hear more about it. I think when I look at AI, especially from an operational excellence standpoint, I tend to break it down into two different verticals. One is embedded AI. That means AI that is siloed and taking place in the background of processes and system operations that the user, or even the customer, does not see. They almost get the benefit of all of those operational efficiencies being obtained by AI. To give you an example, we use AI to help us augment our support agents. When they’re presenting information to customers, AI recommendations and support centre articles are embedded and analysed by AI before they are displayed to our customers. So when our customer searches for information on the support centre, an AI model has already validated it to try and provide an answer to a free-text question, versus having to navigate through categories and hoping that the end user knows exactly what they’re looking for. That’s embedded AI. Then you have augmentation, and this is where you want the AI technology to help your teams deliver better and improve their capabilities. We have empowered all of our teams internally with various different models, including some of the major ones out there, as you can imagine: Gemini, etc. We create dedicated models or gems that are either specific to a project or able to support that team to deliver the work in a more augmented way, supported by easy access to knowledge, recommendations, and sometimes just being able to bounce ideas off a model, which seems to be proving quite beneficial. The combination of the two is where I believe a good AI strategy for operations sits in a business. Being able to run embedded AI silently in the background to drive basic operational efficiencies, like automatic case recommendations and automatic knowledge article surfacing, is key. We’ve built our own proprietary model internally called Sidekick, which operates both for our customers and is simultaneously powered by all the knowledge that the business has acquired over the last 11 or 12 years. We utilise the information from the interactions that we handle with customers, whether that’s support interactions or, in some instances, even analysing the usage of our own product, to feed that model information on how to augment its abilities to serve better recommendations. It goes beyond becoming a generic tool and provides benefits to our customers and our agents, while taking actions on behalf of them that are still validated by an agent, by a human. Sorry, I made it.
Final Advice for Operations Leaders
Matt: That’s a really well-thought-out answer, and I think this has been a really practical look at what operational leadership actually involves when you’re scaling and forced to be as efficient as possible with your growth. I think it’s really useful to get that feedback. I guess, before we go, our listeners are keen to understand your one takeaway piece of advice for operators who are maybe sitting in your shoes three or four years ago in a scaling business. Is there anything that stands out from your experience that you would want to pass on?
Ismail: Several things come to mind, but the most important can be summarised in one sentence: look beyond the SOP. Take a bird’s-eye view of the entire customer journey or strategy you are trying to execute, think outside the box, and do not focus only on what has always been considered normal. Technology and knowledge are more accessible than ever, so traditional operational constraints do not always need to remain in place. The focus should shift from simply doing the work to executing, learning, and improving continuously. Operations leaders must pursue excellence as well as efficiency. SOPs are valuable, but processes change quickly, speed is essential, and overly complex workflows create friction that limits scalability.
