LiveChat serves as a customer service platform with live chat support, help desk and web analytics functionalities, with the goal of allowing users to provide 24/7 support to customers. The core feature of the software is its chat tool, where both service and sales team can answer customers' questions in real time. Online businesses can interact with customers on their website, to be more accessible. With LiveChat, users can identify people on the website and engage them…
$20
per month per user
Podium
Score 5.2 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.
Overall very similar in design, but LiveChat had a better interface, better reporting and analytic tools, better mobile support, and just an easier overall feel. The two products are very much alike in the vast majority of ways, but I ended up preferring this product overall. …
We needed a mechanism in place to make contact with visitors to our website easier. What we discovered is that it's an excellent tool for creating reports and dashboards that show how soon issues are handled. Our website can now be updated in real-time, and all of our internal teams are really excited to use this fantastic technology. I really recommend [LiveChat] to many friends and past colleagues.
Podium is well suited if your business needs are mindless Google Business reviews, and not much else. It's NOT appropriate for clients in the real estate industry. It's NOT appropriate for anyone needing a reliable VoIP solution. It should NOT be marketed as a VoIP product, b/c I found it fails MISERABLY in this regard.
The most important factor of Livechat is their own chat support, I had many requirement from the Sales Head, Support Head to implement features that I was unsure if the product could do. However, as I did the implementation one by one I constantly used the chat support which helped me step by step all the way.
The UX of the product is pretty simple and intuitive to use. There are quite a few features that we could easily plug and play. We tried going to the market to find a solution that could help us but they did not have as many out of the box features and simple to use
Their integration between LiveChat and Chatbot is pretty seamless and since both of them are from the same company, it's works pretty well.
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!
It has a limited amount of agents, so when you have many customer care employees during one shift it is hard to manage the quantity of active agents.
When system is overloaded and many customers are waiting in a queue it starts to works slowly (sometimes the program even lags) and you need to refresh the system to write a message.
Occasionally when you open a new tab, you might lose your current conversation.
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.
The only issues I have had with LiveChat are the technical glitches within the program. These are not common as in everyday occurrences but when the glitches do happen they tend to have very negative repercussions. This is due to chats with customers being dropped, this may be an internal server issue though and may not happen for everyone.
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.
Overall very similar in design, but LiveChat had a better interface, better reporting and analytic tools, better mobile support, and just an easier overall feel. The two products are very much alike in the vast majority of ways, but I ended up preferring this product overall. Price points were similar as well, as well as the allowed number of users.
To be completely candid, I have not used another review software other than Podium. I've worked here for just over 2 years, and our company had just started using Podium. Podium has been useful and successful for our team; therefore, there has not been any reason for me to search for a new company. We are happy with Podium
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
We have a small team so the overall impact is that it is easy for one or two employees to handle a large number of tickets without hiring more people. Plus, you can use this software remotely, save a ton on traveling to and from and office.
Use of Podium has increased the star rating on various review sites for all of our dealerships using the product.
Use of Podium has increased the volume of new monthly positive reviews on various review sites for all of our dealerships.
While we can't measure the impact that positive reviews have on car shoppers, we know that it influences them and we believe that it is a factor for some people in making the decision to visit the dealership. Some customers have come in and said they read our reviews and wanted to give us a shot. Others have even asked for a specific salesperson who's name has come up in positive reviews, without having ever met or spoken with that salesperson.
