Podium Reviews

It is easy to use, easy to train people, and it works to get customer reviews in the right place on the internet. Google reviews are king and the Podium works great with Google Reviews.

The customer support could be better and more knowledgeable. The company is growing fast and they have a lot of new people who do not know the product.

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.

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

Podium has really helped and no issues yet.

They were very responsive up until they got payment. I cannot get a response, cannot login to the software, can't even see any kind of portal. Just a receipt for over $500, and the next one will be coming soon. I have left message after message, left voicemail, nothing. Do not send them your money.

No response from the company, they just charged our card, software does not allow login, screen just spins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

This works exactly as described, You can communicate from your website, request and receive reviews. Too you can send invoices that can be credited to your account. This came in handy for after hours reservations by text when we did not want to publish CC numbers.

Negative was totally about the monthly cost. It was 3x that of the next competitor. Too, they required a 1 year contract which was too much committment.

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

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.

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

There were a few glitches experienced with the app

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.

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

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

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.

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.