Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
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Respond.io
Score 9.8 out of 10
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Respond.io is a business messaging platform from the Hong Kong based company of the same name, that connects customers from any channel to every team. As consumers grow to demand personal communication on a wide variety of channels, businesses are looking to their software vendors and partners to innovate and deliver these customer experiences. Respond.io is designed to meet this challenge, simply.
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
The company's sales funnel support is well represented in Respond.io. I like how its workflow is configured with the initial support bot. It filters and provides a summary of the customer's needs, making the advisor's job easier. Calls are something the platform is sorely lacking. I understand they are under development and something we're eagerly awaiting at the company to be able to track more efficiently on a single platform. La atención del embudo de ventas de la compañía está bien representada en Respond.io me gusta como se configura su flujo de trabajo con el BOT de atención inicial, filtra y me entrega resumen de la necesidad del cliente haciendo más fácil el trabajo del asesor. Las llamadas son algo que le hace mucha falta a la plataforma, entiendo que se encuentra en desarrollo y es algo que esperamos con ansias en la compañía para poder hacer un seguimiento más eficiente en una sola plataforma. This review was originally written in Spanish and has been translated into English using a third-party translation tool. While we strive for accuracy, some nuances or meanings may not be perfectly captured.
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.
It has been very useful for us with very innovative functions and it has the ability to adapt to our operation according to the needs that our administrator indicates to them, and that is very efficient. Besides, it is easy for users to adapt; the functions are very intuitive and easy to implement.
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.
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.
In my opinion, Respond.io is by far the most user-friendly platform out of other similar products. Other advantages rely on features such as AI Agents and automated workflows that are easily adaptable to our company's needs. Lastly. customer support from the Respond.io is admirable, being at all times better than their competitors.
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
The cost of the solution, as compared to our previous solution, has meant that we now pay 50% less than our previous solution for a MUCH superior offering.
We are able to have a single agent (versus multiple agents previously) in our busy season and they are able to keep up with the load of queries being sent through.
The setup time, and integration of new channels into the mix has meant that Respond.io keeps up with the market trends, and we don't have to search for other solutions to engage with our customers - This has saved major amounts of time.
