Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month
Text-Em-All
Score 9.6 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Text-Em-All, headquartered in Frisco, delivers personalized, informational, emergency mass text messages and phone calls, whether they’re going to five people or 50,000.
$0.05
cents
Pricing
Podium
Text-Em-All
Editions & Modules
Podium Essentials
$249
per month 3 users
Podium Standard
$409
per month Unlimited users
Podium Professional
$599
per month Unlimited users
Starter
$0
Credits
$0.05
per credit
Monthly
$19
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Podium
Text-Em-All
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Text-Em-All offers a variety of pricing plans to cater to different user needs. The monthly plan starts at $19, with pricing based on group size, making it ideal for consistent senders who reach the same group(s) each month as often as needed. Plans provide access to the full range of Text-Em-All features, to ensure a comprehensive messaging experience. Additionally, the platform offers credits, or pay-as-you-go pricing model, with costs ranging from 5¢ to 9¢ per credit, suitable for users with occasional or high-volume messaging needs. To help potential customers evaluate the service, Text-Em-All offers a free account so users can evaluate and try the service with 25 free credits.
ZipWhip was fine for introducing our business to texting, but it lacked the ability to integrate with our ATS. The Podium had many valuable bells and whistles but also could not integrate with our ATS. The Sense was very powerful, but we ran into a problem using a single phone
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
We have found them to be very good for immediate communication of a brief message to a large number of people at once. Thus, it works perfectly for a neighborhood association. It may not be suitable for longer messages or situations with excessive notifications.
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!
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.
My initial concern was regarding the "opt out" feature. I work with the senior population, and many of whom are not that tech-savvy. I have a couple of residents who had unintentionally opted out of messages thinking it was an individual message they were skipping. I would suggest that there be a clarifying question when a user chooses to opt out; it should default to opting out of a single message and survey the user to see if they would like to opt out of receiving additional messages. My residents were wondering why they were missing information and why I hadn't informed them of important dates and events.
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!
Text-Em-All is a great way to get messages to our associates versus posting on a memo board and hoping they see it. Very efficient. I would recommend this great tool to companies big or small as a form of business related communications. The only thing I would change is the ability to use more characters in the messages. And it would be a plus if you can translate to different languages in the app.
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.
It's fantastic. In general, it's a 10. But I give it a 7 because of the way I know it can improve. I save my workers' names in lists...and I have only the first and last name fields to classify them. I grade my workers based on their experiences and based on their jobs; so I use the last name field to group them. This could be easier by you adding another field.
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.
There have been few times over the last 18 years that I have had to make changes to our billing or deal with particular tech questions and I have never had any issues with their response time or ability to be helpful once the issues were communicated
This was the best way we were able to reach out to everyone we wanted to, being that there were some not tech-sabi elderly people. This was a better way for them to be able to get the information they needed.
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.
Our last provider was costly for what we needed. We need the ability to text, and that's it. The sense was challenging to navigate; I had to sign a one-year contract and pay thousands upfront. Text-em-all has been the best thing.
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
We definitely have a higher response rate when we contact applicants via text message; it seems to be the thing people check more often than email now.
It saves us a lot of time wasted before with "phone tag" when employees are unable to immediately to take a call.
