EZ Texting vs. Podium

EZ Texting would be well suited for a small business that doesn't have the man power to be able to contact all of the leads they have coming in or who struggles to maintain communication with current clients at times. It would not be appropriate for a business who is looking to send phishing texts out to a large group of people.

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

• I appreciate the detailed delivery reports.
• The support team’s quick responses are appreciated.
• The automation feature is incredibly handy for instantly messaging leads right after they sign up.
• The onboarding process is straightforward.
• Genuine customer inquiries show up in the inbox, organizing important messages in one place.
• You can avoid the email spam folder by using ez texting!
• Opt-outs resolve themselves.

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!

• Drafts don't save well, seemed like I kept having to redo the same text because a draft wouldn't save.
• I want to be able to click and update users quickly, but there were too many steps to add/remove people from lists.
• The app didn't work if I used google SSO - i couldn't ever get signed in.

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

We're excited about EZ Texting and what it does for us. We want to get more into automation with campaigns dealing directly with web sales so a more robust solution will likely leave EZ Texting as our event activation partner and only be used during select times of the year.

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

EZ Text was very easy to set up and very intuitive. It does not take long at all to add your contact lists or to set up templates. It takes a second to get used to when it comes to sending mass group texts, but all in all, it does what we need to do and was easy to implement. We were able to do it ourselves.

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.

We have never needed to use the system and it be unavailable. They seem to schedule their server maintenance perfectly (at least for us!).

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It works pretty well but sometimes things don't work the way you would assume, IE marking messages as read is not as intuitive

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

EZ Texting "gets it"! When I have had something I needed customer service to help me with, they returned my emails and calls promptly. I have a smaller business and they came through as if I was a huge corporate entity. They really care about all sizes of customers!

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

The most important aspect of implementation was selecting a valuable keyword. When we first started using EZ Texting, we were able to grab a simple, easy word to use to connect people to our texts. That proved invaluable in our marketing and selling people on using the service. If we didn't have a good word, I would imagine it wouldn't have been as successful.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We chose EZ Texting over enterprise solutions because of it's ease of set up, ease of use, and low barrier to entry. We had discussions with other companies, and it seemed very complicated and would require a lot of set up on our end. We don't have a dedicated IT or marketing team. We are a small business. So those barriers were just too complicated and we decided to go with an easier solution.

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

We have been grandfathered into our old package, but I wish there were better package options offered now.

Incentivized

We haven't really utilized it for this purpose but it does seem like there are a lot of great options you can utilize.

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

easy access

Incentivized

• Customers, as well as potential customers, do not seem to have any issue, providing their phone numbers for text messages as opposed to receiving countless emails.
• Upselling items has improved considerably due to our ability to notify customers of new products and specials that we are offering in the store.

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