Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month
ShoutOUT
Score 10.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
ShoutOUT is a business texting tool to send personalized SMS campaigns, with advanced personalization and segmentation features. Users can send: personalized alerts promotions reminders short links marketing / promotional campaigns customer feedback collection customer updates conversational messaging team communication in any SMEs including the…
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
If you are mainly using Instagram influencers to promote your business, ShoutOUT works excellent for that. Most of those influencers aren't very tech-savvy, so giving them a coupon code to track their sales and commission them off of that seems to work well. The mass payout feature is pretty simple to use as well, but I wish that you didn't have to do it on a 1-on-1 basis.
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.
Not a vast network of affiliates to choose from if you need them to facilitate that side of your business.
Sometimes the tracking by coupon code doesn't seem to work correctly, and the numbers don't match up with what we see on the backend of our Shopify numbers.
Could make it easier to add creatives and deep linking for affiliates.
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!
It works perfectly for what we need it to do. It is very inexpensive, works well, and makes it easy for us to navigate and use. We can easily add new affiliates and create coupons for them to track their sales. For the influencers that are a little more inclined to post product links and go the more traditional affiliate approach, we can certainly provide that option for them and go that route as well. We like the ease and simplicity.
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.
We only had to use it once, but they got back to us very quickly and helped us solve the issue that we had. So, ShoutOUT support is batting 1000% in our book, but that is only 1 out of 1 and may not be enough of a sample size to verify that they are as good as we think.
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.
We used Shareasale and Commission Junction in the, and they are awesome to manage your traditional affiliates that run blogs or email campaigns. We would still be using those if we did more of a traditional approach to influencers. But since we moved over to a more influencer based marketing approach, ShoutOut is fantastic and has made it simpler for us and our affiliates.
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
Very positive right off the bat because we dropped our Commission Junction expenses and got most of our bigger affiliates to switch over to keep their sales.
Easy to use and much simpler for our affiliate manager to do her work.
