Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month
PowerReviews
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
PowerReviews helps companies gather ratings and reviews from customers, build Q&A content, syndicate reviews across retailers and search engines, and measure results from these endeavors. The company also offers managed services to help businesses improve customer engagement. The company was founded in 2005 and is based in Chicago.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
