Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month
SalesCaptain
Score 9.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
SalesCaptain is a communication platform with a chat based AI agent builder, designed for modern businesses. It unifies phone calls, texting, webchat, and social media messaging into a single collaborative inbox. SalesCaptain can be used to create AI-powered phone and text agents to handle calls, answer queries, route leads, filter spam, and automate tasks — without any technical expertise. SalesCaptain also includes a suite of built-in business apps for managing…
We primarily assessed Podium and Birdeye for customer messaging and reputation management. Both are good at creating reviews and handling simple conversations, but we needed more end-to-end follow-up in our appliance service workflow. Specifically, we needed to convert missed …
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
When several technicians are out in the field and the office is unable to respond to every call, SalesCaptain is particularly well suited for appliance service companies that manage a significant volume of calls and messages. We make extensive use of it for texting missed calls, gathering brief intake information, and keeping clients warm until we can set up a time. It’s also ideal for automated appointment confirmations/reminders, tech on the way updates, and post-service review requests, which reduces down on status-check calls and encourages repeat business. It is less suitable for really complicated diagnostic cases that necessitate a back-and-forth discussion with a senior technician, as well as edge cases where availability or pricing rely on on-site inspection, which are better managed by a human once the first data is obtained.
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.
Because the daily workflow is simple, I would give usability an 8 out of 10. The shared inbox is easy to manage, chats are arranged by client, and once you understand the builder, setting up typical automations like missed-call texts, appointment reminders, and review requests is quick. The platform facilitates communication between techs and administrators and saves our office team a great deal of manual follow-up. I would prefer additional appliance-service templates and better contact/duplicate management to speed up onboarding and scalability. The primary reason it isn't a 10 is that certain sophisticated configuration more intricate routing, deeper reporting, and fine-tuning automations can require some understanding.
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.
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.
We primarily assessed Podium and Birdeye for customer messaging and reputation management. Both are good at creating reviews and handling simple conversations, but we needed more end-to-end follow-up in our appliance service workflow. Specifically, we needed to convert missed calls into scheduled jobs, automatically gather service-intake information appliance type/brand, symptoms, address, preferred time, and run regular appointment reminders and post-job follow-ups from a single shared inbox. SalesCaptain is a better fit since it supports review requests and reputation procedures while being more adaptable for creating those appliance-specific automations and keeping the complete lead-to-job dialog in one location.
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
