Spruce vs. Podium

I think my single most surprising and satisfying experience with ECI and its RockSolid Maxx and then Spruce products was the ease of implementation and rollout -- both on the hardware and software side. ECI seems to have mastered the idea of using an integrated team along with robust tutorials to make that process easy.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• lumber management.
• purchasing and receiving.
• Cloud based.

Incentivized

• 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!

• Point of sales
• P&L usability

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

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.

For the most part when there is internet, we are able to log in and proceed to do our daily tasks which is very helpful, but we have also encountered a glitch on our laptop that we use to do inventory that switches to the last branch that was used. This, in combination with Spruce logging out of the remote connection daily, can cause issues if the person accessing Spruce does not have the remote connection password.

Incentivized

We haven't had any outages or issues whenever we need it over the last few years of use

Incentivized

It moves quickly and has no issues with delays. Performance is good as it is a web-based tool

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We only had a hard time getting our technicians to remember to send the review invites.

Incentivized

Spruce is possibly just above average. Not super impressed with usability and especially not impressed with tech support who is rarely able to answer questions on the first call.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• With $13 million in gross and 40 employees I'm able to run a full back office with a staff of two. In today's tight labor market that is invaluable.
• Being able to implement Spruce with almost no upgrading or replacement of existing computer hardware represented a huge cost savings to us. I'm not even sure what dollar amount I could attach to that.
• Dealing with both a wholesale and retail customers requires that we provide different levels and kinds of reporting and documentation. Spruce has made it easy to respond to the different demands that those customers place upon us.

Incentivized

• 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