This tool is most usable when used in parallel with Sage's accounting management software, as with other accounting systems it can generate errors, leaving room for other credit card payment processor alternatives to exist and be preferred by other potential users for their overall performance. It is promising the ability to develop transaction reports in summary or detailed form, resulting in a better management of income to then make the distribution of budgets in the company, thus achieving better planning and performance of our work. This service allows the processing of payments through touch screen card devices at POS points of sale without having to be sitting at your laptop, fortunately with face to face payments companies with fixed establishments can get their money faster, which constantly benefits the flow of money.
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
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!
When you are reversing a credit card it just deducts from your total batch for the day. Instead of showing a separate charge out of the account. That can cause confusion if someone else is doing your bank reconciliation.
It would be nice is Sage Pay could copy over client emails as well as the address and other information so that you can send that email confirmation of charge without having to go back to pull it up.
If Sage could post it as a total deposit instead of each individual charge for the day that would also save time with bank reconciliation.
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.
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
By simplifying payment processing and automatically posting payments to their related transactions within our Sage accounting product, it has eliminated a source of friction between sales and accounting.
Eliminates clerical errors in recording paymens.
Eliminates one step in the payment reconciliation process by automatically posting payments to their respective transactions.
Insures PCI compliance with scheduled monitoring. No need for a separate product.
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
