Likelihood to Recommend 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
Read full review Square POS is by far the easiest POS software to use at events and train additional team members on - even with temporary or first-time employees. It's easy to see how each event is doing in live time. It gives the event manager a real-time view of revenue earned. Its really easy to create/manage/delete users to keep the platform secure.
Read full review Pros 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! Read full review Mobile transactions (not like from a phone, but in terms of the ability to physically relocate rapidly). Simple setup. Generally uncomplicated pricing. Widespread customer familiarity: because it's so regularly in use in our industry (musicians/entertainment professionals), people know and trust it in a way that you might not with a different provider. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Too much going on for simple users. There are so many different apps and pages now that I get lost almost every time I log onto Square The high percentage of fees taken from sales The difficulty in changing default settings The layout of the “website” you can create is truly a nightmare Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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!
Read full review I don't really foresee anything being able to dislodge Square from our organization—we're not evangelists or anything like that—it's just the best solution we've found for our use case. Being able to quickly handle transactions from customers and then track all of those sales for analysis/bookkeeping later on.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Once set up, Square POS is very easy to use. I feel it is a little too easy. Many other solutions have some layer of complexity to them but Square POS is pretty straightforward and this makes it the ideal POS solution in my opinion. If a solution can remove the barriers to use and allow end users to get on with their tasks without being slowed down, then it is a winner. This is what we were able to achieve with Square POS.
Read full review Reliability and Availability We haven't had any outages or issues whenever we need it over the last few years of use
Read full review Performance It moves quickly and has no issues with delays. Performance is good as it is a web-based tool
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review An admission - I have NEVER had to use Square POS support. The system is seamless, it just works! I have never had any queries about how the system worked as everything is so clearly laid out. I have never had any problems with payments. If their support systems are anywhere near as good as their software, I think we'll be in good hands.
Read full review Implementation Rating We only had a hard time getting our technicians to remember to send the review invites.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We only used Square POS while we were getting set up with
Authorize.Net . It isn't as flashy or recognized by the general public, but in our industry, that isn't a priority. We do very large transactions so the higher rates and fees from Square add up insanely quickly making the lower rates and fees from
Authorize.Net the nail in Square's coffin for us.
Read full review Scalability 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
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Read full review The opportunity cost of waiting for payments and manually bringing them to a bank means that we don't have to visit our bank branch. That alone saves us several hours each month. We can use ordinary computers and mobile devices with Square instead of paying for expensive software or terminals. Our clients appreciate not having to process payments to us, and anything that helps our clients and makes them happy carries more import than I can explain in this space. Read full review ScreenShots