Podium

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.

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.

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 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.