Podium vs. tawk.to

Podium is well suited if your business needs are mindless Google Business reviews, and not much else. It's NOT appropriate for clients in the real estate industry. It's NOT appropriate for anyone needing a reliable VoIP solution. It should NOT be marketed as a VoIP product, b/c I found it fails MISERABLY in this regard.

We have been able to increase our "real world" presence on our website, providing users with support and sales guidance when they need it the most – when they have a question. It provides the extension for free. Furthermore, tawk.to provides tracking solutions for your website, allowing you to see how many visitors visited your site and how long they stayed. You can also see which locations follow your webpage. The low-footprint, web-based solution is simple to install and use (in most cases), and it provides insight into the effectiveness of our web pages and sites.

• 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!

• Being able to see what the contact is typing before they send is great as it allows time to prepare your answer.
• The whisper function is invaluable for keeping colleagues updated and giving staff training.
• The 'Ban' function is great for quick action when you have a nuisance contact.

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

• What I always dislike about any software is the branding that comes along with it.
• The live chat module is not super noticeable since it's just in small print at the bottom of the chat module.
• Small errors can occur, causing the extension in the webpage to disappear.

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.

I think that it's very user friendly. And even in filling out this survey, I've discovered it has beneficial features that I didn't even know it had! It's a lot of capabilities all rolled into one. We're appreciate that tawk.to is an option for us since we haven't found another third party that fits so well with our needs

Incentivized

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

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 use HubSpot for most of our sales and marketing and it's highly effective. However, the chat function doesn't allow communication between staff during chats that tawk.to offers.

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

• Use of Podium has increased the star rating on various review sites for all of our dealerships using the product.
• Use of Podium has increased the volume of new monthly positive reviews on various review sites for all of our dealerships.
• While we can't measure the impact that positive reviews have on car shoppers, we know that it influences them and we believe that it is a factor for some people in making the decision to visit the dealership. Some customers have come in and said they read our reviews and wanted to give us a shot. Others have even asked for a specific salesperson who's name has come up in positive reviews, without having ever met or spoken with that salesperson.

Incentivized

• Engaging with customers directly with live chat.
• Gather customer data for live chat support.

Incentivized