Imonggo is a free web-based point of sale solution that launched in 2009. The vendor says currently it is scaling to address the various needs of states across global markets to become the authority in a point-of-sale solution for growing businesses.
$30
per month, per branch
Podium
Score 6.3 out of 10
N/A
Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
With all of the supplies and outreach we do with clients, Imonggo is really good at tracking that inventory. We can scan it in to have a detailed accounting of where our supplies end up located. We can scan them out to track which department is using supplies and at which quantities. This helps us keep track of our inventory usage rates and therein our connections with clients. This extremely useful in our grant reporting so we can track spending and demonstrate that money is translating to tangible benefits for our clients.
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!
Design - While the UI is navigable, the design looks a bit dated.
Server issues - Occasionally the web-based client is too slow to process information and can result in a double input of said information. It's not life ending but a bit annoying at times.
Custom Tagging - Most of the tags we input to classify inventory have to be entered manually, it would really nice to have those populate automatically.
Inventory buttons - They used to have buttons that you could click to change the inventory in a given field, now you just have to enter the number in the field itself. Was much nicer to have the option of both.
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.
It's something we've used for a while now and we're pleased ultimately with its functionality. This is not to say its perfect, it isn't, but accomplishes a lot of what we need it to do. The fact we've been able to utilize it outside of a traditional retail environment speaks to its versatility and adaptability. For those reasons we'll continue to use until we're presented with a better alternative.
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!
It's pretty phenomenal for inventory management/POS of functions. Relatively easy to use and incorporate into our process. The lack of customization and categorization from the client/customer tracking side of the software is its big limitations and the only frustration for a usability perspective.
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.
It usually loads quickly and without hesitation. There are the occasional slow moments in connectivity that can present small frustrations, but nothing majorly inhibiting. We haven't integrated it apart from being a standalone application.
The few times we've used them, they've been really solid. The only reason they didn't a perfect 10 is that we haven't had a major hiccup by which to judge them.
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.
It's hard to give anything a perfect 10 when it comes to implementation unless it does it all for you. Our biggest complaint was the time it took to set up everything in the software, though to be fair that's almost always going to be the case with inventory management software. The lack of auto-populate fields did slow us down some, but ultimately we got the set up done without egregious headaches, that's a win in my book.
Imonggo makes things simpler given its relatively clean UI and simple options tree that results from each click. Salesforce can do more and use custom tracking more efficiently but is more of a pain to set up and maintain. Xero handles inventory management in a different way than Imonggo and for day to day purposes its easier for our staff to use Immongo. Imonggo lets lower level staff interact with our inventory and we can set up access for them to more akin to its typical POS service, scanning out inventory for clients.
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.
It works exactly as we intend the vast majority of the time. There are moments where the software is slow to respond and thus causes duplicate input of information. That may be the fault of our machine/internet connection, but it happens with enough frequency that it can be a small hiccup. Usually any hiccups that it presents can be remedied immediately.
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
Inventory management - This has been extremely helpful to track what we're using and in what quantities. Makes budgeting a lot easier and more accurate.
Client engagement - It's helped us engage and maintain clients, but by the same token has proven limited as it's difficult to separate clients into custom subcategories.
Grant reporting - The numbers generated through Imonggo are really helpful for providing numerical feedback to our funders.
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
