Podium Features

The product is easy to use and the UX is top notch. While I wish there was a few more customizable options from team management it is easy to use even for people who aren't tech savvy.

The marriage with Podium was good at the start but absolutely TERRIBLE when it ended. The software does its job when it works but I began to notice that over time SMS review requests were no longer being received. Had numerous clients and friends who should have received the auto generated review request but it never hit their inbox. I began to question the validity of Podiums claims and asked numerous...

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-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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The cost is inexpensive and it really does help get reviews

As new additions and upgrades are coming, it feels like reviews has gone on the back burner. Like everything else is more important. In fact, when another dealer of ours signed up, the reviews shows up as an "add on" for invoicing when this used to be the focus. So, it has also gotten way more expensive over the years. Additions also seem to influence functionality of review aspect on dashboard and things "break" more often. Also, I think that support doesn't work weekends from when we had an issue and I had to call that I wash I got.

In addition to being extremely easy to use and straightforward from a backend and frontend standpoint, this software is such an easy way to grow and manage our online reputation. I love that all I have to do (once my campaign is set up) is enter a phone number and hit "send"! It's way easier than asking our customers to leave reviews, and most of them actually do it.

There wasn't much that I didn't like about the software. The only thing worth mentioning is there are a few creative limitations when setting up your campaign. However, nothing that a few tweaks couldn't fix!

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

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

Tracking of leads and communication optins

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The ability to send Google review requests directly to customers via SMS was amazing. It was exactly what we needed to get our review score up to, and past, our target score within the space of only a few months. The interface is incredibly user friendly and managing teams is about as simple as it gets.

I found that a lot of the time it wouldn't correctly tag who within our team was resposible for receiving reviews. There's also no ability to customise reports. It owuld be great if there could also be more integrations with additional review platforms, as we were stuck with only being able to provide the option for Google reviews as we don't accept Facebook Reviews. This caused us to miss a few reviews as customers didn't have Google accounts.

I love how easy it is to answer quick questions that cut down on phone calls to the office. I also can't overstate how helpful the review request templates are for quick texting!

The mobile app is very flawed. Messages are missed or just not seen, even when I know what I'm looking for. Podium is absolutely a desktop experience from the management side.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ease of use. Very easy to slip in and send a message. I also like the integration with our CRM software

Cannot sent to multiple people. For example, there are times when I need to send a message to husband and wife. I can't do that via podium, so I am forced to go tot my cell phone, which is not ideal for my job title.

The data analysis is easy to use and operate

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

Hi Sean, I'm sorry to hear about your experience. My name is Whitney and I'm digging into your account. Would you be able to send an email to support@podium.com so I can assist you more quickly? I will watch for your email.

Simply put, the ease of use. Podium allows us to communicate with our customers across various platforms, while being able to send pictures and forward hyperlinks. It's truly a versatile program that continues to serve us well.

There are the occasional glitches - infrequently, we won't receive email notifications of Podium inquiries. As we typically have the software up and running at all times, this sporadic issue can be minimized.

What I like most about Podium is the ability to add each representative so that they can send out invites to the customers they speak to. I like this feature because as a Marketing Specialist, I'm not on the phone with customers - they are. They can easily plug in their phone number or email address and the customer will receive the invite! They simply click the link and leave us a review. It makes it easy for not just the team, but the customers as well. That is very important to us.

The inability to get access ALL analytical results on the dashboard. You get some of the info, but in order to look at everything, I have to generate different reports from the platform and look at it in a spreadsheet. This is probably the most annoying and inconvenient part of using this platform. It has the ability to filter and look at stats for some things and other things, its not there.

There’s a lot of companies out there that have products for our digits age but I’ve found one in Podium that is useful. I do all reputation management for the Automotive group I work for and it’s incredibly easy to manager because of Podium. I can connect with all customers from all my stores without needing to have multiple logins and with the easy of a click of a button to switch between stores. Lots of other benefits but this is the one I love most. We want to be in direct contact with all our customers and this tool makes it easy.

I can’t really think of something I don’t like. The only thing I would think to improve it as a tool that would offer more to the customer is change from automated responses to Facebook messages to a team that handles incoming messages.

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

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.

I love the ability to customize templates so that we can reach out to and respond to customers in a personalized, however unified voice, no matter who in the office is responding. Requesting reviews is just a click away as well, and customers are able to choose where they would like to leave a review, which our customers truly appreciate.

I wish the integration with Service Titan allowed more information to be pulled into the reporting of review requests, and the ability to push information back into Service Titan, however if using this as a standalone option is works great.