OutboundEngine vs. Podium

OutboundEngine does a referral campaign and I've been able to close a couple of deals based on getting in touch with people who engage with this campaign and state they could use my services in the next 6 months. This is a great follow up tool for those you may or may not know are going to be needing your services.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• The content that they generate to send to our clients is relevant and the clients want to engage with us. It makes us appear more professional and consistent, even though we are a smaller company.
• It helps us stay in touch with clients and helps us stay top of mind. We are able to generate more new business leads if we are in consistent contact with current, former, and potential clients.
• Their customer service and support is outstanding. All my questions were answered and I went into the program feeling confident and knowledgeable.

• 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!

• I do not like the use of drawings to attract new customers, and they have ignored my requests to eliminate that for my personal emails.
• I do not like it when a competitor in my immediate market has the same posts. It cheapens the service or makes it appear that I am simply sharing another's post.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

The biggest issue is poor ROI. The second biggest issue is rigid customer service process, lack of a sense of urgency, and inability to reach out to upper management with issues.

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!

Incentivized

Overall, OutboundEngine is very user friendly. It is simple to set up and explore, and if there are any issues or questions, the customer service team and account managers are always available to help. They are very knowledgeable and were able to explain everything in detail to me. The program is easy to navigate and helps me stay organized, and an uncomplicated and straightforward solution was exactly what I was looking for

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 haven't had to contact Outbound Engine because I haven't had any application errors or unplanned outages. I basically have had such a trouble free experience with them that I haven't had to call. Everything is automated and I get a notice to review every isse. I suppose if I personalized the newsletter a bit more and added some of my own articles, I would need to contact them, (which I should really start to do) but so far things have been so on point, I haven't felt the need.

Incentivized

We haven't had any outages or issues whenever we need it over the last few years of use

Incentivized

It moves quickly and has no issues with delays. Performance is good as it is a web-based tool

Incentivized

The customer service was excellent! Everyone I spoke to was kind and knowledgeable. My account manager was easily reachable. Setup of the OutboundEngine program was explained really thoroughly, and we knew how we could best use the product to meet the needs of our clients and get our online and social media presence off the ground.

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.

Incentivized

We only had a hard time getting our technicians to remember to send the review invites.

Incentivized

I selected it for the ability to have an automated system do 3 things all at once, social media posts, emails and the instant communication with the chat box. I have never seen a chat come through that lead to a helpful client touchpoint. I have never used another product but have since begun to weigh some of the less expensive options.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• One client identified how one article I sent that he read saved him from having to replace his entire AC system.
• One client actually thought I was sending this to him personally because I valued him
• One of the above transacted with me twice for over $3M in sales

Incentivized

• 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