Likelihood to Recommend 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
Read full review Any site with e-commerce should have reviews if possible, to give users the confidence necessary to click "add to cart." PowerReviews is easy to implement and has highly customizable display possibilities. I would recommend them to a mid to large enterprise looking for a scalable solution. Small businesses might be able to use a more stripped down tool.
Read full review Pros 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! Read full review PowerReviews does a good job at flagging responses so there isn't anything inappropriate on our website. PowerReviews provides a nice "snapshot" of reviews with an average rating, recommendation percentage, and the main pros and cons. Making it quick and easy for the customer to get overall information. It is easy for customers to leave reviews. There is a good amount of open-ended questions as well as options that customers can choose from. The system is customizable to fit our needs. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review If you lack basic coding knowledge (or don't have someone on your team to set this up) it may be a bit of a challenge to get started. The backend has a bit of a learning curve to it, but can be worked through easily with persistence. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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!
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability We haven't had any outages or issues whenever we need it over the last few years of use
Read full review Performance It moves quickly and has no issues with delays. Performance is good as it is a web-based tool
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review The team over at PowerReviews was always very helpful with us and our customer service team. They responded to any questions we had quickly.
Read full review Implementation Rating We only had a hard time getting our technicians to remember to send the review invites.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review My experience was with simple software like Google My Business, but for some Reviews & Ratings, it was good enough and supplied my demand. Once the Google world is one of the bests environments for initial and small businesses, I think using their tools someway we can sound better. If it's not the case PowerReviews will serve as well.
Read full review Scalability 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
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Read full review Custom components and PowerReviews API can display positive customer feedback from an element. In return for honest reviews and answers to customer questions, we provide genuine and authentic feedback and let customers strain new products. Syndicated reviews help customers see how products work in real life, which increases trust in our website/business and the products and boosts conversions. Read full review ScreenShots