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
Zipwhip is well suited for many scenarios. Not only do we save money and time with integrations with other programs we have, but we can follow up with a client regarding a trip, should we need further information. A client makes an online reservation and we receive a notification. While we have most of the trip details, the number portion for the drop-off location is missing, so we can reach out directly to the client via Zipwhip and request this information. All aspects of the booking can be done online and with texting and without emails or calls, which is often what many clients who book online prefer. Zipwhip has improved its images/ photos which is fantastic as we use this to send vehicle images to clients, which helps secure bookings. Our employees also use it to send us images of receipts, vehicle engine warning lights that may come on, and other issues (such as a client who may have left a mess in a vehicle). We're also able to send clients documents too, which is great. Obviously, if we have a client with an issue or who is upset, texting is not the best platform on which to address their issues, but it helps us to assess the situation/ issue and gather information before we call the client in person.
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.
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.
It was very easy for users to use, straight forward, and user friendly. The desktop app is very basic but easy to reply to an incoming text, but the user had to know to allow Chrome notifications to see new incoming text via the web browser, which is how they mainly used it.
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.
Swift response time, multiple people have been willing to help with any issue, really anything you could be looking for from a service standpoint, they offer.
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.
Zipwhip is just a little bit more user-friendly than AliveChat because it allows you to text people on more scale. AliveChat has a great website chat function, but its texting platform is a little more clunky than Zipwhip. Zipwhip is a little more expensive but definitely the better product.
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
