FireText vs. Podium vs. Textedly

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 have used Textedly for several years. But recently, in my opinion their commitment to customers and customer service has dramatically declined. They made recent updates to their platform and dramatically increased prices without contacting existing customers. The price of my existing plan increased a significant amount. I have requested that the messages I have purchased be made available to my business and they will not release them until a certain date. When I contacted customer support and ask for resolution, the staff do not answer my questions or offer alternative solutions. I have requested that my account be closed and a refund of the 11 months that I have not used. They will not work with me and only offer that I pay for a higher priced plan or purchase additional messages at a very, very high rate. Please do not use this company. They are no longer considering the needs of customers that have been with them for several years.

• 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!

• Ease of Use!!
• Great customer service when I've had to contact them.
• Great analytics.

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

• Would like the ability to send longer messages.

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

From my experience, their customer service has been disappointing. They have not been willing to work with me and my needs. When pricing was significantly increased, I was not informed of this in advance. It simply increased and I discovered it by accident while reviewing my subscription.

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.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm just overlooking something because it's so easy to use. It literally took no time to be up and running with this program.

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

When I ask questions to customer service, the questions are not all answered. They do not come back with alternative suggestions for me and my subscription. They are not rude but only provide standard "answers" that it appears they have been coached to give

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

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

• 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

• Instant updates to clients.
• Clients can get info without searching our website.
• Sign up is easy even for the most technologically illiterate.

Incentivized