Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month
Revel Systems
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Revel Systems, from the company of the same name headquartered in San Francisco, is a point of sale (POS) system for restaurants, bars, and related businesses (e.g. bakeries, wineries, etc) which can be extended to provide workforce management, menu and table management, and also a customer loyalty program.
$99
*per month
Pricing
Podium
Revel Systems
Editions & Modules
Podium Essentials
$249
per month 3 users
Podium Standard
$409
per month Unlimited users
Podium Professional
$599
per month Unlimited users
POS software cost
$99
*per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Podium
Revel Systems
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
*This rate is available to clients billed annually who include a 3-year Revel Advantage contract. Minimum purchase of two terminals required.
Implementation Fee: On-boarding is $674.00.
Flat rate processing fee.
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
It is very well suited for a one or two location operation. When we got up into the 7 venues and the high volume of sales/traffic, is where things started to get a little jumbled up. The scanning functions and UPC generation is very effective when dealing with keeping track of 7 locations. The "open check" feature is a BIG problem for us, as orders would be made, but the system allowed you to go onto the next order without collecting payment for the previous
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!
We have put an incredible amount of time into the set up, organization and clean up of this product. Now that it is working and flowing a little better, it would be inconvenient and potentially a bad move if we were to go anywhere else now.
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 can be a bit difficult at the beginning but gets easier as long as you are taking advantage of Revel University, Help, and Customer Service when you get stuck
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 got excellent support from Revel whenever we needed it. I personally worked with several Revel client support reps, and they were all extremely dedicated and helpful in assisting with any problem we had.
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.
Square - Used Square with our entire menu for over 3 months. Doesn't handle food applications well.
Shopkeep - While promising, doesn't offer a delivery management in any way, and online ordering is handled through third-party which is more expensive and more time-consuming to manage.
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
