Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
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Signpost
Score 1.7 out of 10
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Signpost is an automated marketing solution that helps local businesses to get more customers, reviews, and referrals. The software builds customer profiles by capturing email, call and credit card transactions. Signpost's automated marketing engine then uses this data to drive new customer conversion and loyalty, reviews and referrals from existing customers.
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
I would NEVER recommend Signposts! Signpost's fee is very expensive for a small company like ours, so I had to cancel the service - or at least TRY to. I contacted them the day after they billed our card for another $2,000, and I was told that we were automatically on the hook for another year, with no exceptions and no recourse. Very greedy and desperate; this doesn't seem like the way to keep happy clients.
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!
The best feature that I like the most and have been using for some time is their marketing tool. Signpost makes marketing an easy task. It has enhanced our productivity.
As I did things manually in the past but now Signpost has made this very much easier for me to just trust their marketing tool to do marketing according to the algorithm.
It helps me to have more organic views on the platform and more positive reviews on the newsletter.
The automated system asks for reviews from the customer which makes it even more helpful in changing and advancing new things.
It also changes our approach to the work and with the automated extremely functional setup it increases our positive reviews which is good for the organization.
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.
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.
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 support team is very professional. I had problems while using Signpost in the past and I contacted their support on that matter.
They responded very professionally, listen[ed] to each and every problem related to the work, and doing hindrance to the flow of work with the full-fledged solution to the problem.
This makes me more confident in using the platform more in depth.
