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.
VeriFone Point definitely knows the VeriFone payment hardware and support tools. They work with many businesses using this hardware, so their remote management tools are thoroughly capable of handling this hardware. This allows them to meet the needs of a small deployment, maybe 20 terminals or fewer. We quickly found out that we would have been better off setting up our own tools and staff to support our deployment of VeriFone hardware. Based on the number of terminals we have in use, our geographical span, and hours of operation, we need to address issues more quickly and personally than VeriFone Point is able to. While they are responsive, their tier I support is pretty generic and mostly assists with power cycling.
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!
Knowledge and experience: Point supports many businesses with many VeriFone terminals throughout the country. Therefore, they have much experience with the hardware.
Availability: When calling for support, it is rare to not get a response from a human. Some calls are answered after only minutes of hold time, others can take much longer, but a human is almost always available.
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.
Bureaucracy: Since this is the payment industry and a very large company, they move slower than an iceberg with most projects, including ordering new terminals or adding new features.
Availability of project support: Aside hardware troubleshooting, it often feels very difficult to get help from Point support for things like opening a new location, adding a feature, or making other changes requiring any level of planning.
Inconsistent support staff: One issue may be handled very differently by different support staff. We often work with somebody for hours on one issue only to call back later and have the same issue solved in minutes by a different person.
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.
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
We started using VeriFone Point when we switched from software-based credit card processing to VeriFone payment software. With our previous software system, we had a similar experience with support to what we have experienced with VeriFone Point. Support for payment industry tools tends to be excessively pragmatic, to the point where they ignore symptom clues while having us power cycle hardware for the fifth time.
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
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.
