In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Advi Bishnoi, Head of Consulting and Customer Success at social.plus, a platform that helps brands build in-app communities and drive engagement, retention, and monetization through social features.
Advi shares how his path from mechanical engineering through strategy and operations led him to discover that customer success — with its blend of consulting, relationship-building, and problem-solving — was where he thrived most. He explains why social.plus operates more like infrastructure-as-a-service than traditional SaaS, what that means for how his team is structured and measured, and why no two clients ever have the same definition of success.
He also opens up about how CS and product share OKRs, how he scaled to over a hundred customers without losing quality, and why the human touch in CS isn’t going anywhere — even as AI takes on more operational tasks.
What You’ll Learn
- Why infrastructure-as-a-service demands a more consultative approach to customer success
- How social.plus structures its CS and consulting teams — and where they overlap
- Why Advi moved away from tier-based team structures toward regional splits for better career development
- How CS and product share OKRs and collaborate on roadmap prioritization
- What frameworks helped social.plus scale to 100+ customers while maintaining quality
- How Advi thinks about the future of CS in an AI-driven world
Key Insights & Takeaways
- Building blocks require consulting, not just onboarding. When you sell infrastructure rather than a finished product, every client builds something different — and CS has to guide that journey with frameworks, strategy, and genuine expertise.
- Success looks different for every client. A gym chain wants to drive subscription renewals through community motivation. A beauty retailer wants to increase basket size. Defining the right North star per client is core to the CS role.
- Tier-based team structures can limit career growth. Moving to a regional model where each CSM handles a mix of mid-market and enterprise accounts creates richer learning opportunities and better career trajectories.
- CS and product must share accountability. Shared OKRs around feature adoption, monthly active users, and revenue growth keep both teams aligned and prevent the classic blame game when clients churn.
- Best practices are your most scalable asset. Documenting what works across industries and use cases — and turning that into a living framework — is what allows CS to maintain quality as the customer base grows.
- The human touch in CS isn’t going away. AI can drive operational efficiency and surface alerts, but the consultative, trust-based side of customer success remains deeply human.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:04 – 0:29)
Welcome to Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today I’m joined by Advi Bishnoi, Head of Consulting and Customer Success at Social Plus, a platform that helps brands build in-app communities and drive engagement, retention, and monetization through social features. Advi, I’m really happy to have you here. Thanks for joining.
Advi (0:29 – 0:32)
Irina, it’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Irina (0:33 – 0:48)
You started in mechanical engineering and your strategy, growth, operation, and yes.
What pulled you towards the post-sale and community side of tech?
From Mechanical Engineering to Customer Success
Advi (0:49 – 2:09)
Interesting, it was a necessity. I left engineering behind in college. I realized that was not the way, but I did know that I had a fascination with tech, so I got into the tech industry eventually.
I worked at a few SaaS companies before joining Social Plus. I’ve been here since we started the product itself, so I’ve had to wear many hats. We started as a very small team and you’re doing everything you can.
I found that the customer success and consulting aspect was the most interesting for me. I think partially it has to do with the fact that it’s not software as a service. We provide social features for people to put into their app, but it’s infrastructure as a service. We provide it as a software development kit and APIs for them to easily integrate it. It makes it more flexible in terms of user experience and look and feel, and it’s right in your app rather than redirecting you somewhere else for your community. Because what we’re selling is building blocks and not the house, every client has a different thing that they build out of it. It’s like Legos in a way.
Irina (2:09 – 2:12)
Exactly my point. I wanted to say it’s like a Lego.
Advi (2:13 – 2:55)
And that’s what makes it really cool. It’s never boring because each client might be in different industries, they might have different goals out of their community, and community can have many different end objectives. It keeps it really fresh and interesting.
Being able to play a part in so many clients’ apps and their stories and their development, like working with Harley Davidson for their biker community or working with Ulta Beauty for a beauty community, there’s such diversity to it that one learns so much from all these different places. So for me as a generalist, it makes me very happy.
Why CS and Consulting Live Together at social.plus
Irina (2:56 – 3:15)
Before we get into how you define success, why is it consulting and customer success together? Are those two separate teams or one?
Advi (3:16 – 5:29)
It’s interesting. It’s because of what I mentioned — it’s building blocks and it’s applicable in different places with different use cases.
Each project in itself becomes slightly consultative. Depending on the tier of your accounts and your customer segmentation, those who are able to have enterprise support can go deeper. Then some of them are able to have our standard level of support, where we understand that because it’s not out of the box, there can be challenges.
We also understand that the whole point of us doing this is telling people: your tech team should focus on your main objective as an app. Whether you are a financial app building financial features or a health and fitness app focused on those capabilities, your team shouldn’t worry about the community building aspect or the social features part of it, because we can handle that. Especially in the case of community, it’s really hard to just say build it and they will come. That doesn’t happen.
That’s why there’s a level of aftercare given by our customer success team in terms of different frameworks to follow and different guides to understand how you should categorize your groups, how you should segment your users, and understand community objectives and value proposition for each of those users. So that’s our standard care: providing these frameworks, providing these capabilities, and helping out where we can.
The consultative part takes it a step further for those who don’t have the necessary resources for marketing, content strategy, or community management, really helping them build out their whole strategy, put it down, create it for them and hand it to them. That’s where our consulting team comes in. There’s some overlap in people, but it goes slightly more in depth in terms of research on that side.
How the CS Team Is Structured And Why It Changed
Irina (5:31 – 5:39)
What does your team look like today? How is it split in terms of roles and responsibilities? How do you have it structured?
Advi (5:40 – 6:44)
Yeah, it’s interesting. We’ve tried a couple of ways over the years. We, I think I started with the tier based.
One, a few people will handle the top tier. A few people will handle the middle. A few people will handle the SMBs, but I think that what I’ve noticed over time, at least as a mentor, is that it’s very, it can be detrimental in terms of team development, right?
And a team like career projection, et cetera. So from that perspective, now we have a more of a regional split where there still is the tiers apply, but in for each CSM that’s there, each of them have their own few mid market and a couple of enterprise clients that they need to look after if they’re at that level. So once they’ve had some experience working with the mid market, et cetera, or if they come in as an enterprise customer success manager, then shifting them to make sure that they can develop, get that sort of going, and then creating that project trajectory for them in essence.
Irina (6:45 – 7:03)
That’s very interesting. So initially you had it split it by tiers and now you are splitting it by regions and in one region, you can have one to one tiers. And I’m hoping that the reason why you did this was from a team development perspective, not necessarily from a business perspective.
Advi (7:04 – 7:04)
Yeah.
Irina (7:05 – 7:19)
I’m curious what made you think that switching that CSM will develop more if they interact with different type of clients? What was the reasoning behind this?
Advi (7:19 – 9:01)
It’s the level of involvement, right? The level of engagement.
For a lot of SMBs, sometimes the level of engagement isn’t what you would want it to be. They’re not able to put enough resources into the project in order to make it successful. Community itself is an amalgamation of product teams, business teams, marketing teams.
They all need to put in a little bit here or there and then they all reap the rewards of it individually in their own departments. But the point is that it needs a bit of coordination or in this case, it’s essentially project management in a way. And so from that perspective, getting exposure to those clients that have a slightly bigger budget, that are willing to put in more resources, that go more in depth, let’s say into customization.
So we have obviously our own UI kits that are open source, but then lots of clients want to completely customize and do their own thing, right? And so getting involved in those sort of use cases and those sort of implementations, I think increases their ability to look at it from a generalist point of view and understand that like your scope of use cases is not limited to ABC, but because we have building blocks, the whole world is open in terms of that. And I think when you work with clients who are more invested and I guess for them this is a strategic priority, right?
For those clients it’s more effective learning and development as well.
Defining Success When Every Client Is Different
Irina (9:03 – 9:34)
Because you operate across so many industries and use cases, how do you define success? Is there a shared North Star?
Advi (9:35 – 13:07)
It’s a great question. To be fair, not everyone has the same North star. There is space for multiple North stars in that point of view.
There is a governing idea though. If you take any of the social media apps out there, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, why did they capture user attention? Why do they have so many daily active users? The principle behind it is that interactivity in apps is what gives rise to more usage. Creating more opportunities for users to interact either with each other or the brand gives them space to spend more time on the app, engage more, and overall be retained more. So at the core, it’s that.
Now, beyond that, it can be influenced by the industry you’re in. Let’s say you’re in retail or e-commerce like Ulta Beauty. The end objective there might be that users who are active in the community should be buying more frequently or their basket size should be greater, and even implementing monetization opportunities directly in the community, creating a different revenue channel.
However, when we’re working with someone like Smart Fit from Brazil, one of the big gym chains in the world, the objective isn’t revenue or selling to the user because the user is already paying a subscription to the gym. For them, the objective is: how can we make sure that this community is so encouraging from a health and fitness point of view that it motivates users to keep coming back to the gym, stay active, and renew their subscription year on year.
So that’s the industry basis. The other aspect is what is the objective of establishing your community. There are quite a few outcomes one can get from community. There’s a great thought leader, David Spinks, who has a model called the SPACES model. It might miss a few things in terms of capabilities, but it does hit the nail on the head. SPACES stands for Support, Product, Acquisition, Contribution, Engagement, and Success. Support, like the Apple Support Forum where people come to ask questions and get answers. Product, where you get feedback directly from your community to iterate and improve. Acquisition, a community that brings in new customers. Contribution, where users provide content, code, or actions you can recycle and use elsewhere. Engagement, in terms of overall app engagement, loyalty and retention. And Success, whatever your revenue or business driver is. All of these outcomes are possible, but the core always starts from engagement and retention.
Shared OKRs: How CS and Product Stay Aligned
Irina (13:09 – 13:31)
There seems to be an overlap between CS and product responsibility here. Who owns driving engagement — CS or product?
Advi (13:32 – 14:31)
Both. For sure.
So in terms of product department and the CS department, when it comes to client satisfaction, client growth, we share those responsibilities and burdens. So it’s a two-sided beast, right? If the product is not up to par, then what can CS be expected to do?
But if the product is great and CS is not really showing the right path to clients, then it might be something that doesn’t work out also. It’s a delicate balance. But I think we work really well with our product team on that aspect.
We plan out really well whenever there’s client feedback from meetings. We always have that and we keep a good record of that when it comes to feature requests, et cetera. And then even when it comes to product prioritization, roadmap, planning, et cetera, we are quite involved from a CS standpoint.
Irina (14:32 – 14:42)
In terms of, you mentioned OKRs, I’m curious, what specific APIs do you have included there that are shared with the product?
Advi (14:43 – 14:58)
Oh, specifically around feature expansion, usage of more features or growth in monthly active users, and then indirectly growth in actual revenue based off of that. So all across those three, essentially.
Irina (14:58 – 15:03)
Are you also measuring time to value and the onboarding?
Advi (15:03 – 15:11)
Yeah, those separately. We’re also tracking and measuring as well. Yeah.
But those are different goals we work towards.
Balancing Client Advocacy and Product Prioritization
Irina (15:11 – 15:35)
How do you decide when to push back on a client’s request versus advocating for it internally?
Advi (15:35 – 17:21)
It’s a delicate game. We have to be aware of client needs and how many clients are expressing that same need, no matter the size of the client. If it’s a very specific request applicable to just one or two clients, it becomes a heavily debated topic.
It’s a gray area where there’s no right or wrong. There are multiple factors we look at: if we were to develop this, how many clients would it be applicable to, of those clients how many would actually want to use it or put it into place, and would it drive value and for whom. We funnel it down and make an assessment that way.
We use a prioritization matrix where each of my team members votes and gives a priority score to these different factors based on their clients. Our sales team is also involved, based on the opportunities they’re looking to close within the same period and whether there’s any overlap in needs there. On the technical side, the product and architecture teams do their own prioritization more so in terms of effort. Then we find the balance between those two essentially.
Scaling to 100+ Customers Without Losing Quality
Irina (17:24 – 17:46)
You scaled to more than a hundred customers. What systems and foundations made that possible without losing quality?
Advi (17:47 – 20:32)
A few key things come to mind. The biggest one is best practices and tracking them, being able to say: this feature implementation leads to this impact in this scenario. So when a customer comes in from an industry where we already have an existing client, we’re able to confidently say, based on our knowledge, this is the path to success. Or we’re able to easily forewarn them of potential pitfalls.
For example, because we’re infrastructure as a service, you have the ability to set things however you want. One of my clients set it so that anybody could create a group within their community. I told them they should not do that, at least when starting off and just launching.
Maybe later slowly roll out those permissions for certain super users or ambassadors, but I advised against it from the start because we had already encountered this before. They chose to go ahead with their plan, and two weeks later they had 700 groups in their community, a lot of them with one or two members. It didn’t make any sense, it was disorganized.
So it’s about making sure we have the right touch points, the right kickoff, and are leading them on the right path when it comes to implementation and onboarding. Having a step-by-step process that we guide them through. That process is also reflected in what we’ve built out as the community building framework, which covers everything from community planning to beta launch, adoption, engagement, and content creation.
It’s a large, living framework that keeps getting iterated on. We first built it when we were at around 15 to 20 customers, really trying to see which things drive what sort of impact and putting that together. Being able to constantly collect customer feedback from different customers is what helped shape it and put forward that definition of success.
The Hardest Strategic Call: Accepting You Can’t Deliver Everything
Irina (20:33 – 20:38)
What’s been one of the hardest strategic calls you’ve had to make as a CS leader?
Advi (20:39 – 21:45)
Oof, I think it has to be on the product side. More so just accepting that resources are a limitation is a tough thing. When you have a diverse set of clients with a diverse set of use cases, you also get a diverse set of requests, and being able to balance that is definitely challenging. I like to always say that in customer success we’re the advocate for the client internally, but we’re the advocate for the company externally. So we’re playing a balancing game of pushing product on behalf of clients, but also pushing back on clients depending on what feels right and what might have the right impact. That can often be challenging in terms of figuring out how to deliver the best value for every client without losing sight of priorities.
The Future of CS in an AI-Driven World
Irina (21:52 – 22:20)
Last question: how do you see the role of a CSM evolving, particularly around retention and monetization, as AI becomes more central to operations?
Advi (22:21 – 24:43)
For us, we’re fortunate enough that CS means more than just implementation, tracking, and gathering insights, just because of the consultative and in-depth nature of it. So in our case, we’re slightly more secure and more fortunate in terms of having that flexibility.
There’s no clear answer in terms of what AI will soon be capable of doing. I know we’re headed in a certain direction, but in terms of timeline of it fully taking over people’s jobs and responsibilities, that’s not something I’m sure about.
I do think there are advantages to leveraging the tools available right now. At the moment, AI is good at driving analysis, operational efficiency, and bridging the gaps between different data sets. We’re using it to help optimize our processes, like getting an alert when a contract renewal is coming up or when usage hits certain thresholds, based on different tracking and assessments we have set up.
But the client facing side of it is not going away soon. I’ve seen some very good AI-generated videos and creations through tools like Captions AI, but I feel like there’s a trust factor to it. I want to be talking to someone who understands my situation on a personal level and can help me put things into play. I hope that person is leveraging AI to provide the best capabilities, but at the end of the day I don’t want it to be a fully automated process. That human touch is still very necessary.
Irina (24:45 – 25:10)
Advi, thank you for the conversation. It was great to explore the intersection of consulting, CS, and how you think about driving ROI through engagement and community. To everyone listening, thanks for tuning in. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and mastering customer success.
