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
SimpleTexting has been wonderful for the purposes for which we signed up. We wanted an easy-to-use platform that allowed 2-way texting, assigned a phone number, had the ability to collect phone numbers/contact easily (whether through an import or a user sign-up, spoiler SimpleTexting has both), etc. It has provided all of that and more easily, without a contract. And the platform is so easy to use for our team. One of the only issues we're having is wanting to expand our use of SimpleTexting, and using multiple options for texting (i.e., shortcode, toll-free, landline/business enabling) has been difficult on one account.
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!
SimpleTexting provides excellent value based on their messaging packages but also by allowing its customers to utilize multiple keywords. This is helpful for our organization because we utilize this software across many different departments.
SimpleTexting analytics and reporting is a key strength of the software. The numbers they report weigh heavily on what we determine as a success of un-successful communication campaign.
SImpleTexting has excellent customer service available at the click of a button. Their team has always been available and offered solutions when we have had questions or run into a problem.
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.
A lot of glitches and bugs, with promised fixes that keep dragging on for some time.
Mobile notifications are very buggy. You have to keep force-closing the app and re-opening it multiple times to get the notifications to refresh.
Constant toggling of 'Unread' and 'All' on mobile or desktop to get the notifications to clear and show up as opened, otherwise it will imply it's not read.
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.
With SimpleTexting updating little things here and there almost daily. We reach out to their support team constantly. They have one of the best response rates I have ever experienced! Normally it takes less than a minute to speak to a real person, but even if they are busy they have an answer bot send you articles to see if you can solve the issue yourself first! One of the best support teams ever
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.
SimpleTexting is just simple. From the pricing to the interface, it stacks up against the competition by just being as powerful and simple as possible. No extra distractions or confusion. For our company, we wanted texting software that we could easily upsell and integrate into our overall marketing campaigns and SimpleTexting did just that.
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
Because we are able to reach more people through subscribing, our number of donations has increased and the number of volunteers has increased. We have gone from an average of 5 volunteers an even to 25-30. Our donations increased by 25%.
