Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month
Text Request
Score 9.7 out of 10
N/A
Text Request is a business texting platform built to ignite customer engagement. It is a plug-and-play messaging solutions to everyday communication problems that enables businesses to connect to customers anytime, anywhere. Text Request is designed to scale from one person handling a few conversations, to thousands of employees sending millions of messages, to custom solutions built on its API.
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
Text Request is appropriate for all kinds of scenarios! I really have NOT found a situation where Text Request was not suitable to use to try and reach a patient. We have used TR to contact a patient that we have received a referral from their Primary Doctor and we need to schedule an evaluation, we have used TR for insurance and Billing, we have used TR for contacting patients that missed a visit and to reschedule.
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.
I think so far the only improvement I could suggest would be to be able to "un-send" a text within like 30 secs in case you send something out incorrectly.
Maybe adding more emojis
When sending a file make the size of the pic they see bigger
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.
Text Request is very user friendly. I started using the Text Request platform on Day 1 without any specific instructions and I was able to figure it out very easily!
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.
I use Hatch for my service businesses because they integrate with our CRM tool and Text Request does not. I am NOT a fan - their support is not even half as good as TR but they fill a need that our company has. I like the technology, customer service and ease of use that Text Request gives to us - I just want them to integrate with my CRM! If so, I'd leave Hatch in a heartbeat!
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
