Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) is a social media management platform. Key features include: Plan and Organize Social Campaigns, Manage Real-Time Engagement, and Learn and Prove Social Impact
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Podium
Score 6.3 out of 10
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Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
The best it could be used for is running campaigns. Be it a product launch or be it any new event that you are hosting. If you need to quickly grab attention, then this might be your choice. Also the report given after the campaign is a good insight for improving your next campaign.
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!
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.
There is no product like Khoros. Our company lives and dies by the analytics, and to date, we have not seen a more comprehensive analytics structure for any social media management tool. Khoros support is also fantastic, responding and resolving any and all questions, ideas, or complaints, usually in 24 hours.
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!
Khoros Marketing is very user-friendly and easy to navigate. The calendar visibility is the view I use most so I can see all posts going out on all of our channels. It allows us to time posts in a proper cadence so we don't overlap with other pressing content.
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 still experience a bit of downtime and slowness here but things have drastically improved in the last year with their feature updates and reconfigured hosting.
Khoros has greatly improved the performance of its SaaS products in the last 5 years. Their applications, including Conversations, Intelligence, and Experiences, all load quickly with real-time data. This performance is critical to provide meaningful, social customer support, and marketing. The performance maintains integrity even when you deploy powerful integrations like Salesforce Customer Relationship Manager.
Overall, support does a great job and is timely in their responses and efforts. We have had to contact support many times due to the Capture app. Some tickets have remained open for months, while others get resolved quickly. I understand this is not always up to support and they often have to wait for their engineering team to fix issues that we identified, but it's difficult to deal with issues that are affecting our workflow, especially for extended amounts of time.
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.
• As a very early customer, we did not undergo formal training but worked closely with the team to get the system set up to do what we wanted. However, online training resources are now available with many blog posts / video lessons and tutorials.
it is important to note that my perspective is not necessarily common - I'm a geek/nerd/poweruser in general, so I found the online resources to be more than adequate (and often very aesthetically pleasing, too). That said, a less "geeky" person might struggle a bit.
The implementation team from Khoros were great - they worked hard to understand our somewhat complex organization, and were with us all the way through face to face meetings, user training, and technical training. We had a clearly defined account manager and implementation manager, who worked really effectively together and with us.
On some accounts that I am on, I use Asana in place of Khoros marketing but I much prefer Khoros Marketing. I prefer Khoros Marketing over Asana because I can post directly (and schedule posts) on Khoros but not on Asana. Also, I can moderate directly on Khoros but not Asana
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.
Khoros seems to struggle a little past a certain level of scale. More than 30 separate per day makes it difficult to view all content in the weekly calendar view, which is frustrating and could cause issues. However, the ability to schedule one post across multiple channels is hugely valuable and cuts down on a lot of duplicative work.
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
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
