LivePerson headquartered in New York offers solutions for AI-guided live chat and conversational messaging, with the Conversation Cloud (formerly LiveEngage), supporting sales and service teams with answering questions across all popular messaging channels.
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Podium
Score 5.9 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.
Liveperson LiveEngage is good for larger deployments with lots of agents, and where the rollout plan is broad with respect to the visitors who you will be targeting. It allows you to manipulate more of the data for reporting than many other platforms. The premium cost and some drawbacks with configuring smaller groups might make it lose some appeal for smaller companies or deployments.
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
The login and interface are near flawless (for what I need). Each of our chat reps has learned how to use it within minutes. Procedure on how to answer certain questions etc., are the only trouble we have, but LiveEngage actually helps with that by storing easily accessible pre-made responses to help guide you or just to paste in directly.
Visibility into the context of a customer's question is very helpful. Before I open a chat window, I know exactly what a customer has been browsing prior to asking, and I can usually gather a context from the pre-chat question window. Functionally, it does everything I need it to. Though I don't spend much time in the platform.
There haven't been glitches that I remember or have heard of from other reps. The chats usually continue uninterrupted for the duration. Also, you can copy and paste the log pretty easily if necessary.
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!
Is my understanding that they have their majority of support between US and Israel, which is great however the timeframe to get a response depending on the issue may take longer than expected.
Their dev support can take some getting used to, some issues that are not supported by their regular tech support is within Dev and you will be redirected to their website.
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.
LivePerson has been a great tool for our company and everything is customized. We can customize everything from the canned responses, operator surveys, and customer surveys. We receive a lot of positive information from our customers; and to be able to provide technical support of the website as well as status information for already placed orders is awesome
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.
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.
Desk.com allows us to bring all of our support tools together into one management system. It does not have all the features that LivePerson has for support but it has all the features we need. It also gives us an easier path to self-service and gives our user more direct access to all the channels they need
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.
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
Without giving away numbers, I know it has been a huge tool for our customer solutions department. Conversion isn't as high as compared to phones, but in terms of providing customers with quick information (shipping prices/times, trade restrictions, order status, etc.) it's huge.
Increased employee efficiency is a huge one. The capability of taking 3 chats at a time allows each Rep to be way more efficient than on phones alone.
Giving the customer the choice to call in, chat or email is huge. LP combines chat and email into one intuitive program so, again, it increases efficiencies for our team and allows them to provide better customer service.
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
