Podium

Avantages

I liked the ease of templates and that it works with lots of CRMs

Inconvénients

Customer service. Had lots of issues that took forever because customer service was so bad.

Avantages

There’s absolutely no produce company. Other than the fact that they’re very good liars. They con you into signing up under false pretenses. They have zero communication. The only reason they have good reviews is because you can’t write -ones on any other social media accounts and I’d like to know where the reading five star reviews on Google when there’s no Google review to be found.

Inconvénients

Yes, they are absolutely a con! They lied and misrepresented their business and strategies to me overcharged me. I had to dispute with my credit card company through several months, and now I’m being harassed by them for an outstanding bill of a month and a half of service that I never received. I’ve requested to speak to people and above positions with no luck and now I’m gonna have to have my attorney get involved. Do not do any business with this company.

Avantages

The platform works well and there are some specific features that others do not have employed, such as the ability for the platform to identify landlines in advance when attempting to initiate SMS messaging, whereas others simply allow the message to go out and you wait for the failure..

Inconvénients

The least desirable component of this platform is cost, especially if you happen to be looking at it as a platform to deploy for use with multiple locations. We were a 2 store implementation, so higher cost, but not large enough for volume pricing leverage. the interface for synchronizing contact database information was not overly straightforward.

Avantages

Podium is very easy to use and access, especially via the convenient app. we personally really like the ease of sending out review links as well as how hassle free the payment processing is.

Inconvénients

The app has alot of features and even options for different users on the same app, however it can sometimes get confusing when trying to switch profiles.

Avantages

Not much, the automation was nice, that was about it.

Inconvénients

The constant phone calls from different sales specialists that are trying to sell you services. BRUTAL for anyone who employs podium.

Avantages

Loved the fact that I could email and text on the same screen.

Inconvénients

The price, we had to switch due to cost savings and response from support

Avantages

Podium has made it easy to get in touch with clients in a non-threatening way that can be easily responded to in the time a client has available.

Inconvénients

There are updates often that change the layout and can make it difficult to navigate while getting used to the new layout.

Avantages

It is always on the forefront of new technology and they will keep you up to date on when new features come out as well as sometimes let you beta test.

Inconvénients

It is extremely expensive for what it is. The personnel also don't coordinate very well so often you will get a marketing solicitation call and email even though you already use the product.

Avantages

There initial sales guy was great but went downhill from there!

Inconvénients

the worst company I've ever dealt with! They don’t connect to Shopify, fail to send abandoned cart texts as promised, and never notify when an order ships. When you need help, they’re MIA! But they have no problem Charging $635 per month. stay away, or you’ll regret it!

Avantages

I was lied to during onboarding and never told about the 1 yr contract until I read it for myself during the signing. They are not transparent and their customer service is the worst I've EVER experienced.

Inconvénients

They have a huge lack of transparancy. They are willing to lie to you to onboard and try to keep your business. They will make HUGE mistakes like porting away your personal number with NO accountability or concerns for your business. Wasted countless hours during set up and after trying use their platform all while being charged for services not used.

Avantages

Easy to use and responsive - Podium made it easy for me to be personally responsive in our customer experience management.

Inconvénients

I found a competing product that uses single initial qualifying query to help screen potential problems and allowing me to respond and mitigate prior to the push to review - this is a more effective and compliant approach. Podium made the invite and it the negative review posted even before I had the opportunity to mitigate.

Avantages

The data analysis is easy to use and operate

Inconvénients

Continuous IT tickets that had months with inadequate service. The lack of communication when the system was not working properly but yet still taking our payments. I have multiple documents and IT tickets to support our challenges. This year cost with not the ability to get Google reviews made the experience a failure

Avantages

I like the platform for messaging to our clients. The text templates are customizable and easy to select. The interface is user friendly and very easy to navigate.

Inconvénients

Podium phones is the worst. I think it is fairly new system for Podium therefore there are kinks form them to fix. We had several outages, and it was the worst because our clients could not get ahold of us. Their support was not available 24/7 to address time sensitive issues. There explanations always had to do with changes in management so it took even longer for issues to be addressed and resolved. We are happy we switched to Kenect for messaging and Nextiva for VOIP.

Avantages

All in one interface, mostly seamless communication portal, partial functionality standalone app.

Inconvénients

Tried to trap us in contract - acknowledged cancellation and then proceeded to continue billing and pretend as if there was no cancellation. Ran through 5-6 “reps” consulting with their “team” who mostly promised fixes and then left the company before resolution.

Avantages

It's very easy to use although the way that contacts are entered and default to being unsubscribed is weird and not very intuitive.

Inconvénients

You can NOT get your contacts out. The only email marketing/CRM system that I've ever come across that does not allow users to export their own contacts.

Avantages

Easy to navigate and gets the job done fairly quickly

Inconvénients

Not as efficient at getting our messages to patients

Avantages

I do not like much about Podium. The processing rates were pretty good.

Inconvénients

You cannot export your data.
There are features missing from the software that are sold on the site and discussed in their support videos/tutorials. These are important for teams.
This has been an awful experience. The product does not do what it says it will do. When I decided to cancel, they gave me the run-around. It took over three months for them to release my phone number ($1800), and now they are saying that I "automatically" signed up for an additional year. I would recommend that you find a better, more user-friendly solution. They are out there. Shame on you Podium.

Avantages

Great way to get Reviews with easy text and email links to send.

Inconvénients

That it is not free, would be the only thing that I didn't like.

Avantages

It comes wit SMS marketing and mass messaging capabilities
It supports live chat and makes meeting customer satisfaction easy
It makes handling customer experience easy

Inconvénients

Podium has really helped and no issues yet.

Avantages

I like the ability to integrate my business landline number with SMS capability. It's easy to send text review links to customers.

Inconvénients

Customer service is horrific. Let me repeat--horrific! I rarely leave reviews but the inconveniences afford to me deserve a stern warning to others considering this platform. I am fairly tech savvy and a good problem solver. However, problems, server disconnects, software glitches occur from time-to-time, and customer service contacts cannot be reached, are unreliable, and human customer service is lacking!

Avantages

Ease of deployment for our web chat box and google review management. This platform really helped our Sales team with response times with new and existing customers. Which in turn captured more business. Podium also made it really easy for new clients to leave us a google review.

Inconvénients

We no longer using Podium due to price. We moved over to Sinch MessageMedia for all of our SMS and review needs.

Avantages

User friendly platform, easy to navigate, easy to connect with dcustomers and manage communications. The messaging function allows for real-time conversations that are personal and direct

Inconvénients

The anayltics dashboard is not very deep and there are times where i didnt receive alerts.

Avantages

I like that chats are assigned to the person that answers and then disapears from others use.

Inconvénients

The lag time between messages. It hurt us in responding to customers.

Avantages

The program worked great and did it's job as advertised

Inconvénients

This company is anti-gun. They suddenly changed this policy after 2 years of use and now we have to find another company to offer these service. They gave us 1 week to get off their platform with no notice of the change in their policy, or retro active support since we have been using their product for years.Would not recommend a company that will just kick you off with the level of integration this company has with your systems.

Avantages

They offer a good product, and have a lot of services that are beneficial to a dealership.

Inconvénients

Their sales team is relentless and a little on the shady side. They call both my work phone and my cell phone constantly, and have even gone so far as to spoof a local area code to get me to answer my personal cell phone to pitch me on more products we don't want/need.

Avantages

Easy to use, easy to set up. Integrates with my POS System, lacks design options and customization.

Inconvénients

Customer service took a while to fix issues, and most of the time by the time they reached out, I had fixed it.

Avantages

Podium is a great and effective program that allows you to effectively communicate with customers, receive feedback from them, and get reports on your communication. I would highly recommend it to anyone in customer service.

Inconvénients

I have not used the program long enough to have anything I really dislike. From what I have seen, I already like it more than the program I switched from!

Avantages

we can immediately take care of a customers concerns/questions in real time

Inconvénients

pushing leads to crm is a little slow but thats nitpicking

Avantages

We used it daily to send out links to make leaving a review easier for our customers.

Inconvénients

Not being able to pin point exactly where the issues were coming from.

Avantages

Is great for keeping track of all of our customers

Inconvénients

Too expensive for what it offers to my company

Avantages

Podium offers a great service and lots of wonderful features.

Inconvénients

They are priced significantly higher than their competitors. Further, be ready for the constant barrage of upselling.

Avantages

From the Podium dashboard, you are able to connect with your past customers via email or text to prequalify their experience with your business was good prior to sending them a link to leave a review.

Inconvénients

Pricing. It is much more expensive than other similar services. You may only want to use podium for one specific feature and have to pay for an annual plan that includes features you don't need.

Avantages

One of the notable features of Podium is its ability to help businesses improve their online reputation by automating the process of requesting and collecting customer reviews across different review sites

Inconvénients

one potential downside of Podium is its pricing

Avantages

Loved their software and initially their support was amazing, we saw this as worthy of the price tag.

Inconvénients

Eventually support dropped off and no longer saw the value in the pricing

Avantages

Tracking of leads and communication optins

Inconvénients

Good ideas but not up to the test. The product did not work and you at boxed in to a year contract and had to go up the chain of supervisors to get released.

Avantages

I love how Podium allows teams of employees from different departments to work together to answer customer questions and requests. One beautiful thing is they were able to port our regular phone number and turn it into a text-able number. So our landline number that all of our customers are familiar with has now become a texting number as well. We're able to tell our customers those beautiful words: "Just send us a text."

Inconvénients

The only downside I see in Podium is the search feature. It is actually astounding how bad it is. You would think in this day and age a basic keyword search feature would be pretty standard. Not so in Podium. The only way to look up old conversations is remembering the name of the person you were chatting with. I'm honestly dismayed by it.

Avantages

Podium is incredibly user-friendly. Our store has a wide range of computer knowledge--from advanced to those who struggle to find the back button. Podium has been a good fit for all levels.

Inconvénients

I'm not a fan of pulling the photos from my photo album or seeing that the pictures I take through the app are stored in my phone's photo album. I take many photos of products for customers and am very busy, so I often forget that they are there. I've used Podium for so long that when I look back at my years of personal photos I still find a picture of some random product that I forgot to delete.

Avantages

Podium is AWESOME!! We use it daily to text with our customers who love to communicate via text messages. With every employee having it up throughout the day any one of us can quickly respond to our customers texts and if it's after hours you can set an automatic reply text message that says we are not open at this time so they know someone will get back with them ASAP. It makes it so much easier texting on the PC than on your phone and it uses your company's phone number so you can just tell your customers to call OR text our number. For those who do prefer using their phone to text, Podium has an app that is absolutely awesome too! You will get push notifications on your phone whenever a customer texts or notifications for anything else in the app. You can send customer links and photos easily with Podium. Another great tool is you can direct message or have group chats with your coworkers in Podium. Podium has helped us tremendously with our company reviews too!! Allowing us to set up templates that text our customers once their project is completed asking them to rate us on a scale of 1-10 and texting them links to where they can leave a review online if they wish too. I know Podium also has a function where you can send an invoice amount text to your customers and have them pay via that link but we have not used this feature yet. Podium is awesome and has definitely made operations A LOT easier for our company.

Inconvénients

There isn't really anything we don't like about Podium!

Avantages

When the software works, it really is a nice system. Our issue is that the software never worked. My employees had consistent issues with messages not showing up in the inbox or not receiving notifications when new messages came in. I myself did not receive a single notification for a new message for over a month, and it was still not fixed by the time we finally decided we had enough and switched to another system. I also had to reach out to them weekly to see if my issues have been figured out because they will never reach back out to you about the issues you're having.

Inconvénients

Trying to cancel with Podium is the worst experience we've ever had with a company. My partner had to pretend to be a new client prospect to get Podium to help us because they will dodge and outright ignore correspondences about cancelling service. They've admitted their issues, told us they are letting us out of the 1-yr contract, yet they are still charging our credit card each month. We have finally had to take the issue up with our credit card company.

Alternatives envisagées 

Birdeye

Pourquoi passer à Podium

That sentence in my title was in every cancellation template email we received from Podium. We’ve received multiple “your services have been cancelled” template emails with that sentence in it, and yet we still have not had our services fully cancelled. We believe this sentence to be very fitting and a view into how Podium treats their customers. This is the first bad review I’ve ever written. We’re in customer service. We know how important reviews are to businesses, and we would rather just move on from a bad experience than write a bad review about a company. We know most companies are trying their best, and sometimes bad things just happen. I feel it necessary to write this though as to help others when making a decision about starting services with Podium. Podium will use that 1-yr agreement you sign against you no matter how many issues you have with their services. They will ignore you, say they've cancelled services with the same template email over and over again, and yet your credit card will still be charged each month. No customer should have to resort to pretending to be a new customer to get someone to help, and no customer should have to finally deal with their credit card company because Podium will not cancel your account properly no matter what they say. We hope that everyone takes pause when signing that 1-year contract with Podium. We wish we had taken pause before signing up.

Avantages

What I like most about Podium is its ease of not only use but training anybody new. We are a growing company hiring annually now more and more and Podium is by far the easiest trained software that we use. It's not only self-efficient but training is clean, straight-forward, and it's beyond user-friendly.

Inconvénients

There are at this stage in the game a lot of add on's that you can certainly do with Podium. It goes from a very low cost to mid-range cost quickly as you realize you really do need and want all the bells and whistles that Podium can offer. It's not so much that it is a negative, but it does become a challenge sometimes when having to pitch a wonderful new feature of Podium to your decision-makers when the words "and it cost ---- extra" comes into play.

Avantages

Good Sales Team and that's all. Don't trust them

Inconvénients

I signed the contract, having listened to the beautiful promises of the sellers that everything would work perfectly and make it easier for me to communicate with clients. As a result, you can only interact with clients within this platform, you will never receive a notification that the client is waiting or the client has sent you a message. Only within the platform. If you missed the message - that's your problem. Given that my call center is still accepting messages from customers via phone, email, and Yelp, keeping another platform open is extremely inconvenient. As a result - a bunch of missed messages and dissatisfied customers. I was promised free text messages included in the price. As a result, I have to pay more than $1000 for mailings. When I tried to stop the service, the manager informed me that I had a contract for a year and I was obliged to pay for this year, even if the service did not perform its functions and promises.

Avantages

The ease of use is great, I love taking the conversation from the website to texting, and it's great for that. It also makes it pretty easy to request reviews, and so that is great.

Inconvénients

It feels really expensive to me. At this point I might be able to get similar functionality for significantly less money, but nonetheless, because we've made the investment in it and trained our team on it, I selfishly don't want to have to deplore another program and do another batch of training.

Alternatives envisagées 

Birdeye et Intercom

Pourquoi choisir Podium 

I think about 2 or so years ago, maybe a year and a half

Logiciel antérieur 

Intercom

Pourquoi passer à Podium

It had the components of Intercom I liked, but also gave us the ability to hopefully simply get reviews. I also liked that the conversation moves from the web to the phone.

Avantages

I love that all of our messaging either from different social media sites or from our own website comes to one location! It is really nice that all of our employees have access to this site and because of that, we are able to reply very quickly to messages that come in. I also like that our reviews show up here and we are able to respond to them through the Podium platform rather than needing to go to Google, Facebook, Yelp etc. to find the reviews.

Inconvénients

I wish that somehow we were able to consolidate the review notifications so that if we invite someone to review us on google and they write a review, we don't get two separate messages/notifications about it.

Alternatives envisagées 

Meta for Business et Weave

Pourquoi passer à Podium

Podium encompasses the messaging aspect of our website, inquiries from Facebook, text messages to our company phone number and reviews from multiple websites. There was no other software that offered an encompassing package like Podium for the price that we are paying.

Avantages

Being able to offer texting as an office feature for the first time was beneficial to our practice. Having a mobile app or being able to use it on the computer during office hours was beneficial.

Inconvénients

We wishes Podium offered more features during our time. However, podium opened the door to us for texting and became a huge impact in our office for the 1-2 years we had it.

Avantages

Mostly worked well and had pretty good interface with website for chat as well

Inconvénients

Tried to cancel this and was not allowed. Went through all kinds of hoops including a mandatory "screen share" by our account rep trying to keep us which made it worse. You CANNOT call or write in and cancel ever! They have their methods and basically won't let you out of a contract. We canceled ours finally after the screen share, the hard close from two different people to keep paying and then still got billed since they had our credit card. I would never recommend such a company. I have NEVER heard of someone NOT taking written notice well in advance to close a monthly contract. We did finally get it resolved to only pay an additional 9 days past when we asked for it to be closed, but its 9 days of our money.

One of the poorest experiences i have had in 32 years of the retail business trying to cancel something. Mandatory screen share and hard sell to stay - Simply unbelievable

Avantages

What I like the most about this software is that it allows to carry out all its functionalities from a single panel, which is one of the qualities that I like the most because we can carry out the work within this platform in an extremely easy, without adverse or disastrous complications, mentioning that it allows you to automatically track the reviews of the products you make, or the services offered by an organization, in order to respond very quickly, on the comments made by each of the registered users to the business platforms maintained by each of these establishments.

Inconvénients

One of the most notable difficulties about this software is its price, mentioning that it is very broad and expensive when we address economic issues, this can be a significant problem, because most organizations, called small , they can't afford to pay these high monetary costs, not to mention that they should integrate better combined reports for the multiple customer locations they interact with frequently.

Avantages

The review integration with facebook and google is excellent. We are able to send review invitations via text and respond to them within the app. We can also assign them to the various salespeople who actually worked the deal so they can respond accordingly. We also have podium on our homepage to engage with browsing customers and answer any questions they may have.

Inconvénients

It doesn't integrate with some of our third party advertising sources like other options do. Sometimes there are glitches with the software and messages do not send properly.

Avantages

I love how simple it is to navigate and how effective it is to reach out to customers and chat with them when they really need assistance

Inconvénients

There were a few glitches experienced with the app

Avantages

-Chats with customers are through texts
-Different sales agents can answer, and there is no limit to how many sales agents are allowed on 1 account

Inconvénients

-Does not integrate to our CRM tool (Hubspot)
-Not really using the review portion of Podium
-No automatic chatbot integration

Avantages

The promises that the salesrep made. That's what I liked best. Unfortunately, it didn't deliver.

Inconvénients

Horrendous customer support. Never heard from our assigned Account Executive. Most other tech support is done through webchat which involves employees in foreign countries who know little about the actual product. When I finally was able to schedule one-on-one tech support, the rep didn't seem to take my needs seriously.