The terminals themselves don't seem to be well designed and have the appearance of being put together with off-the-shelf components. Hiding cables can be challenging. The design is slim and svelte enough, but it has the appearance of being more fragile (although it doesn't appear be particularly so). These terminals are best when left in a single location, at least in our implementation as switching revenue centers requires IT involvement.
Podium is well suited if your business needs are mindless Google Business reviews, and not much else. It's NOT appropriate for clients in the real estate industry. It's NOT appropriate for anyone needing a reliable VoIP solution. It should NOT be marketed as a VoIP product, b/c I found it fails MISERABLY in this regard.
Maintains conversations indefinitely, so we are able to go back to confirm details from conversations.
Provides the ability for our company to have a 'team' messaging platform where we can communicate with one another via single person to a single person, groups where we can add/subtract members of the group... this is invaluable to our organization.
Until today(!), we could 'share' or forward a message to one another; oddly, that feature disappeared just today, so I'm hoping it's a glitch!
Integration with rGuest Seat is terrible, and it's a companion product. This definitely never lived up to its promise.
The boot process for the terminals is long and ridiculously unprofessional looking. There are some sloppy defaults for the boot process and the initial setup is needlessly complicated.
Shift management is confusing for staff, particularly when signing out at the end of a shift. Would like to see more work on this area.
Account manager communications: I had been asking my Podium account manager for integration with our CRM tool for over 8 months before my account manager fell silent. After another 6 months, I proactively reached out only to find out that the integration had been in Beta for months and 8 other companies had already integrated. It was frustrating that my account manager did not remember a key request and make the Beta available to me the minute that it was open.
Again, Podium has been so wonderful in the year and a half we have been using it, we are able to integrate it with our CRM and use alot of the available features. The most helpful has been getting TONS of reviews on MULTIPLE sites through Podium!
While giving our clients the ability to leave a review was there, we had much worse results and got fewer reviews through the Podium portal than we did by sending our clients simple email requests, or simply having our service staff ask for a review while still on the clients' job sites.
Support is hit or miss with this platform. If you get a tech that knows the system, the experience is excellent. There have been more instances of escalated tickets going unanswered, which I deem unacceptable. Even if the answer is "I don't know" or "we can't do that" I expect an answer. Contrast this with VMware, who will file a bug report if they can't resolve the immediate issue and then will follow up with you. When it comes to IG support, I don't have confidence that they'll pursue a concern very far and they've been lax with follow-up
I have to send an email to get information. They have a chat system but I end up having to go through my rep for account questions. It was a little frustrating to not have a direct phone number to call with questions. I would like to see a helpline added.
InfoGenesis had a great implementation team and worked with us closely on the rollout to ensure minimal disruption. Micros terminals had better design overall and looked like they'd have lasted for 100 years, but Oracle was not fun to work with. IG's reporting options have made our Finance people happy as well. We were concerned with multiple integrations on the platform it replaced, but all of these turned out to be non-issues and we were able to work with IG staff to get what we wanted out of it. I'd prefer the hardware to be thought out more thoroughly, as it's weak in appearance by comparison despite being very usable.
To be completely candid, I have not used another review software other than Podium. I've worked here for just over 2 years, and our company had just started using Podium. Podium has been useful and successful for our team; therefore, there has not been any reason for me to search for a new company. We are happy with Podium
Its easy to scale to different departments as needed. We initially began using it to solve one problem and as new features became available it was easy to scale this and include other departments who could benefit from its tools
Our previous platform required more than occasional love and care and was hard to develop solutions for. InfoGenesis terminals don't have a lot of trouble in operation, which leads to more uptime and happy customers.
I previously mentioned rGuest Seat integration. We never got this to work as promised and got different answers from different resources when asked the same question.
Server sprawl began almost immediately. We went from a two server design to five in the end and still have occasional problems with kitchen printers.
Use of Podium has increased the star rating on various review sites for all of our dealerships using the product.
Use of Podium has increased the volume of new monthly positive reviews on various review sites for all of our dealerships.
While we can't measure the impact that positive reviews have on car shoppers, we know that it influences them and we believe that it is a factor for some people in making the decision to visit the dealership. Some customers have come in and said they read our reviews and wanted to give us a shot. Others have even asked for a specific salesperson who's name has come up in positive reviews, without having ever met or spoken with that salesperson.
