Podium is used in a different capacity at Byrider, but Yext is a platform that we've looked into. It has similar features but the ease of use for multi-unit sets it apart.
It is my absolute recommendation for anyone at a multi-location, brick-and-mortar business that is consumer-focused. I haven't demoed any other tools that could come close to meeting the needs that I would have either at my previous agency role for clients or currently at my client-side job. However, not all companies that have a footprint/distribution in multiple areas are suited; I had a brewery client with a presence in multiple states (their products were in stores and salespeople were staffed in the area), but given MomentFeed's basis in listing data around physical locations, there wasn't a real way that the product could have accommodated. Cases like that are a square peg/round hole situation.
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!
More reporting options. There is a wealth of data able to be reported around just one Facebook page; now imagine the type of data you have available to analyze across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of local pages. They already do a good job of showing some valuable insights (and providing every other metric they can via spreadsheet exports) but I think there's pretty much an endless array of possibilities beyond what they have. I suppose that's a slippery slope though.
Some minor UI/UX issues. Some fields operate weirdly, some buttons may act funky, or the platform may not remember your location group selection when you move from one part of the product to another. Easily overlooked, however.
Social media publishing is sometimes delayed and may go out a handful of minutes after you intended. Not a problem in most cases, but I'd schedule natively or with another tool if you're depending on a post to go out at an exact moment.
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.
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.
I have not personally used Yext, but after a couple demos I didn't find that it fit the needs of my past clients or current company as much as MomentFeed could; I had also heard horror stories about how Yext effectively holds listing data hostage or simply removes it once you are no longer a customer.
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
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
