Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month
ResellerRatings
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
ResellerRatings is an online ratings site where consumers submit ratings and reviews of online retailers, and online retailers participate to respond to reviewers and to gather reviews from their customers post-purchase. As of July 11, 2017, ResellerRatings.com had over 6.2 million user-submitted reviews for 202,000 stores. Consumers use ResellerRatings to check the reputation of online stores before buying. ForeSee acquired ResellerRatings, and now both ForeSee and ReselleRatings are…
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.
ResellerRatings is a good tool for collecting ratings and quantifying how satisfied a user is with your website. It is relatively easy to implement and get setup and does have some pre-built widgets for adding reviews to your site. ResellerRatings does require a bit of training to get the hang of the administrative interface and it does require support staff to monitor, flag, and respond to reviews that are submitted (which can be a challenge depending on # of reviews and staffing levels).
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!
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
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.
ResellerRatings has had a positive impact on ROI by allowing us to quickly gather user ratings/reviews and integrate the aggregate review with Google's paid search ads (via star ratings showing in ads)
ResellerRatings has also had a positive impact on our business by allowing us to collect reviews and display on our website without the need for internal development resources and IT work (which would have been very costly for us).
One thing we had wanted to accomplish through the use of ResellerRatings was to display reviews on our website and provide that detail to Google in a consumable format which would result in star ratings showing in our organic search results. However, we were not able to accomplish this and Google never picked up our rating from the ResellerRating's widgets, so that was a bit of a letdown.
