Podium

Pros

Easy to use. Easy for our employees to use on both mobile and desktop. Easy setup on our website. Captures reviews from customers.

Cons

Unable to connect our Facebook pages to Podium, even after talking with support.

Alternatives Considered

Conversational Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Podium

We liked the pricing & features such as reputation management.

Pros

So easy to send secure payment links and send mass-messages. Checking payments at the end of the day is simple and easy. Refunding payments is a breeze.

Cons

There is no archive of photos that have been sent by customers. The search function is finnicky and often does not find what I am looking for.

Pros

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

Cons

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!

Pros

How easy everything is to use. Getting client information as well as responding to their inquiries is a breeze

Cons

Not being able to contact a person with issues. Their website does not have a contact me phone number

Alternatives Considered

Birdeye

Reasons for Switching to Podium

gave us an initial discount and because of this they were the best priced at the time.

Pros

the simplicity of the Program was great.

Cons

I am not sure there was anything that I didn't dislike

Pros

It's good for getting customer reviews (sometimes) and has lots of features

Cons

They throw you to the wolves. You have to get everything figured out yourself. Communication is a huge issue. We had a manager leave at our company and they continued sending emails to her email address for a year and a half! Despite me contacting support and calling in, saying I am the main point of contact. They were sending emails to a non existent inbox. Half of the things we were paying for did not work. Things weren't set up, and nobody told us, or how to do it. Today I got a 16 step instructions document from a rep, with no help. Sometimes it takes a week to hear back from anyone.

Alternatives Considered

Swell, Chekkit, Birdeye and Trustpilot

Reasons for Switching to Podium

It was already set up when I started this position and job

Pros

It was the most cost-effective option at the time we purchased

Cons

Did not like the features, felt like customer service was lacking

Alternatives Considered

Lighthouse 360

Reasons for Switching to Podium

It was the most cost-effective option at the time and was recommend by a colleague

Pros

I chose the platform because I thought it was the only real option to replace ZipWhip which ends service in December. They were listed as a recommended vendor.

Cons

The people. They started out great, but at the onset I told them that most of the features they offered we wouldn’t use. And they didn’t have a Chrome extension, which we used a lot. But we needed a new text service as ours was going away. The cost was about 3x what I was paying and that was for the lowest level of service and they lock you in to a contract for a year. But I didn’t know of another option.I found Text Request, which is almost ZipWhip exactly, less than 48 hours after I signed their contract. I was transparent with them about Text Request really meeting our needs and price point perfectly and we weren’t paying for a bunch of features we wouldn’t use just to get texting. I asked to cancel before we even onboarded. They declined and said someone from legal would reach out. No one from legal reached out. They offered to move me to a more basic plan with a lower price point which, as I felt locked in, was willing to look at after I got back from vacation. Upon my return from vacation I reached out twice but that was the last I heard from [sensitive content hidden]. Out of the blue I got an email from another person at Podium cancelling my account. It just felt like a yucky experience overall. It felt like they are more interested in getting paid than making sure the platform is the right fit for their customers.

Alternatives Considered

Voxie

Reasons for Choosing Podium

Because ZipWhip is ending service in December and Podium appeared to be the only option.

Switched From

Zipwhip

Reasons for Switching to Podium

Voxie didn’t have some of the features we loved.

Pros

The only thing is that you can reply to reviews easy. But for a cost.

Cons

Phone service is just horrble dont reccomend them.

Pros

Easy to use with continually growing features and solutions

Cons

expensive compared to similar software providers

Pros

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.

Cons

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 Considered

Birdeye

Reasons for Switching to 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.

Pros

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."

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

pushing leads to crm is a little slow but thats nitpicking

Pros

Increased Google reviews exponentially and messaging transparency made it more effective.

Cons

Quickbooks lack of integration and sane for PestRoutes

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

There were a few glitches experienced with the app

Pros

One place, multiple platforms combine. Appointment Center Reps do not need to check multiple dashboards, log in to multiple sites. It is all very transparent who sent what, saw what, etc. There are sites that are cheaper but we like the simplicity of this one. We can text customers and employee, create templates for consistent messaging, request reviews, NPS, all in one place.
We know there are additional products available such as payments on Podium that we choose not to use. There is more that can be done with it than we need.

Cons

It is not the cheapest platform for what we are doing but it is comfortable and does a great job.
Would be interested to see group, mass messaging, and schedule messaging.

Pros

Many things to like about podium

- Fills the gap between sending out blanked newsletters and cold calling customers
- turns genuine review, conversations into real customers
- Provides sms followup, mobile notifications, web chats, video chats
- Team chats and collaboration feature
- Deployment is easy

Cons

Would have benefited from a free trial plan for small businesses to try before they buy.

Pros

Direct Google integration is definitely the biggest pro here. They also are focused on having staff message customers directly for reviews one-on-one. It won't work for everyone, just depends on the business model.

Cons

Very limited functionality and visibility into your account. Right now, it's basically just a review solicitation platform via messaging and email. It's efficient at getting star ratings and reviews, but that's about it. If you're looking for surveys, look elsewhere. Also, when I was a customer, they didn't even have NPS Score. That's pretty basic. Reporting is very limited and it's hard to get an overview of your total account, only individual locations. Customization is little to none for both the dashboard and the actual campaigns. Oh, and it's crazy expensive. You're basically paying for the direct Google integration. Which is super nice and important, but still. I also had a very negative experience that was unique to me. I had very specific contract conditions that were not met and it was a very difficult and painful process to get rectified. I felt very misled by the company and lost any trust I had in them. It was very disappointing.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

The data analysis is easy to use and operate

Cons

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

Easy to navigate and gets the job done fairly quickly

Cons

Not as efficient at getting our messages to patients

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

Podium has really helped and no issues yet.

Pros

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

Cons

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!

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

Podium works so well. Easy to communicate with customers, request reviews and get payments either at the jobsite or from the office.

Cons

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

Alternatives Considered

Birdeye

Reasons for Choosing Podium

Swell was awful in every phase! Review request failed to send. The did away with text to pay.

Switched From

Swell

Reasons for Switching to Podium

Used Podium previously, more impressed by their product and their people.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

Easy to use and was very useful to determine which rep was dealing with who.

Cons

Price was definetely not a good aspect of this product

Pros

+   Customers appreciate the payment features since they are simple to use.+ The Facebook integration makes it simple to turn messages into leads.+ It is simple to utilize for the entire crew here.

Cons

- From an admin perspective, the mobile app is less enlightening than the browser version.- Monitoring conversations is frequently difficult because inboxes and where things end up are frequently confused.- Podium would be a one-stop shop if it offered document signature alternatives and surveying features.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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!

Pros

Introduced us to the potential of automating our review process.
Helped with automating website conversations

Cons

The customer service - no way to talk to a real person
The price - to much for what it did

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

Podium offers a great service and lots of wonderful features.

Cons

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

Pros

Is great for keeping track of all of our customers

Cons

Too expensive for what it offers to my company

Pros

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

Cons

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

Pros

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

Cons

one potential downside of Podium is its pricing