Any FEC small or big can benefit from CenterEdge. It pulls your entire facility together under one point of sale. Groups, redemption prizes, Bowling modules, Laser Tag modules, webstore, kiosks...just to name a few. As CenterEdge is relatively young they are growing and expanding at a rate that can not be ignored and we are glad to have them back at our locations.
Podium is well suited for several types of businesses. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, Podium would be a great way for you to ask that customers leave you a review online sharing their awesome experience. For medium to large businesses, Podium review invites can be automated through the company's customer management system, allowing the use of Podium to be simple and not timely, even with a large customer base. It may not be appropriate for a large company to manually send out individual review invites
Point of sale. The interface is very user friendly and can get very granular on how you want to ring in guests not only at the point of sale but from a groups perspective as well.
Modular. There are so many great integrations with CenterEdge from inventory tracking to Laser Tag modules and if they don't have it, chances are they will very soon.
Groups. This is how we make a good amount of our income and CenterEdge really helps us deliver a great guest experience from the time the sale is made to the time the guest leave the building after their event.
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!
External Employee Scheduling. CenterEdge has its own scheduler but in today's high tech world there needs to be more integration with big companies like When to Work and HotSchedules.
F&B Recipe creation and management could be a little easier but it still does a good job.
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.
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.
Micros is great for the restaurant industry, but we're not that. We are an FEC with MANY activities under one roof including F & B, but Micros just could not handle keep track of everything we offer to our guests. Centeredge does that and more. If you are a bar/restaurant then Micros is for you. But if you are an FEC with many different offerings and you want to have control over your sales, don't think...choose CenterEdge.
We use Digital Air Strike at our two GM dealerships because it is one of a small list of reputation management companies authorized by GM as part of their SFE program. Digital Air Strike surveys our customers and invites them to write a review about our dealership. It is not as effective or flexible as Podium so we have been using Podium at those dealerships alongside Digital Air Strike. We also recently started a trial use of ReplyPro which is a service that monitors review sites and writes customized responses to positive reviews and suggested responses to negative reviews. I'd like to see Podium add this as part of their service so we can consolidate 3rd party vendors and manage every aspect of online reputation management from one place.
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
I am glad there are card readers now, sales team members too often try to just send a request instead of taking payment onsite.
It's made capturing messaging leads much easier.
It's worth the cost but if it did a few more things it would be worth a lot more to us. Document signatures, surveying after jobs, even geotagging of photos/reviews for SEO
