Podium vs. STORIS

The way we use Podium is that when the customer agrees to purchase a vehicle and is waiting to go into the finance office for paperwork (which can be anywhere from a 10-60 minute wait), the salesperson sends the review invite while sitting with them. The customer is more likely to write a review during some downtime, while they are excited about their new purchase, and happy with the salesperson who has been serving them.

Incentivized

Inter-store Transfers and Inventories have always been an issue, and this program will let you know that something isn't completed and or processed correctly. The ability to set the security levels of staff is a major plus for our business, from Management to RSA's we can allow what information we want them to have. RSA's love the instant feedback of the program from tracking sales and commissions to responding to an incorrect sales order. The system doesn't allow you to forget there may be a problem, which is key to ensuring accuracy of your processes and procedures.

• 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!

• Inventory Control is an important factor. STORIS does a good job of tracking inventory from the order being placed with the vendor to the merchandise being delivered to the customer.
• The Sales module provides extensive information pertaining to each purchase from the customer. The comments section of this module, as well as all other modules, is very useful to determine what actions were taken for each sale, along with dates and times of every occurrence.
• The Report Builder is an excellent tool to create customized reports relevant to our business' way of obtaining information.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Would like to see a more "out of the box" user friendly set up for smaller companies that don't have IT.
• Would like to see a built reporting package that companies can expand on.

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!

Incentivized

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.

This can be an overwhelming experience if you are new to point of sale software. There is a lot of information and decisions that have to be made as you set up this system. I highly recommend the in person training to get a better idea of the process. With that being said, this is the reason you want a system like this, it gives you the ability, control and support to build a system that meets your needs with the flexibility to make changes as you grow.

We haven't had any outages or issues whenever we need it over the last few years of use

Incentivized

It moves quickly and has no issues with delays. Performance is good as it is a web-based tool

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

All support staff are professional, courteous, and genuinely interested in helping

Incentivized

We only had a hard time getting our technicians to remember to send the review invites.

Incentivized

To be completely candid, I have not used another review software other than Podium. I've worked here for just over 2 years, and our company had just started using Podium. Podium has been useful and successful for our team; therefore, there has not been any reason for me to search for a new company. We are happy with Podium

Incentivized

We used a similar POS system for 35 years, and it worked quite well for a long time. However, the base technology did not keep up with the changing times, and any updates to the software were slow and expensive. In considering a new solution, we looked at several other companies that had very similar offerings, but felt that STORIS was the most technologically advanced, and had the most to offer.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• 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

• I have worked with Storis in 3 retailers now. In all cases, it has scaled beautifully to allow the companies to grow.

Incentivized