Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month
Vonage Communications APIs
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Vonage APIs (formerly Nexmo and TokBox) help growing startups and agile enterprises enhance customer experience and realize new business outcomes at scale. With a comprehensive suite of communication channels, a global platform, and expert support, users can abstract the complexity of communications and innovate faster.
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.
While there are likely a variety of scenarios that would work well with Vonage [Communications APIs (formerly Nexmo)], implementations that need transactional message and response actions are a great fit. Our experience with transactional messaging has been really good and we are continuing to look at opportunities to expand our usage of this part of their service.
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!
I like the delivery speed, it's very instantaneous. As soon as the delivery status changes on the website, the message gets delivered. The rates are also cheap and affordable.
The accuracy of the services and the non-stop supportive team.
Simple API, easy to integrate with existing notification functionality in your Laravel apps.
Ease of implementation. We needed less than one month to go live.
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.
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.
The overall usability of Vonage [Communications APIs (formerly Nexmo)] system for message delivery is sufficient for our implementation. Some improvements and additional reporting options in the account administration interface would increase our utilization of the post-delivery data further in order to provide further value-added features for our clients.
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.
The product feels a bit like a black box since it's built to be an off-the-shelf solution so sometimes it feels like the only way to really understand it is to talk to an engineer directly as the documentation is so-so.
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
Nexmo is the best platform in the industry for sure. We don't use all the features that the API provides but we are really satisfied with the ones we use. We are sure this is the best solution in the market if you need to solve the communication in real time with your customers. When we have to build a new website we are going to support the solution with Nexmo.
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.
