Podium Reviews and Ratings

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We mostly use Podium for communicating with customers. Its AI chatbots, live chat and marketing tools are good features. It’s really well designed for customer communication. Customer support is excellent—especially if you get stuck during setup, which is fairly likely. It also integrates with the other software we use, so it fits into our existing workflow pretty well (not perfectly, but good enough).

Likelihood to Recommend

It's great for patient communication, and it takes some of the load off our receptionists because the chat feature (and AI chatbots) can do a lot of work that would otherwise need to be handled over the phone. It comes with a ton of features though. So if you think you’ll use most or all of the features, and it matters to you to have everything in one place, then Podium is definitely worth looking into. If not, you may be better off choosing separate, more specialized tools that cover the same needs, cost less, and are probably easier to use.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We hired Podium to manage our VoIP Phone system among other solutions, such as SMS, and MMS. The VoIP phone service has completely failed basic call quality standards, and it has dropped most of our phone calls. There has been trouble connecting phone calls for every one of our lines. I've reached out to their Support team, and a phone engineer named Mark explained to me that our phone lines were never properly onboarded.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I would recommend any other VOIP software paired with another review software over Podium all day every day. Podium was such a bad experience for us, even if they offered to give us free access I would not use it. In our experience, the onboarding took more than 2 months before we could use the phones and only the phones non of the other fancy features could be used. When we addressed this with customer support they were like, "idk" (I don't know). In my opinion, nobody from the Podium appeared to care. We were offered money back and instead, they accidentally charged our bank more money. In our experience, when we tried to address it, they sent us to collections. I just cant express how bad I think they were. I don't know how they are in business.

Likelihood to Recommend

I honestly cannot think of any situation where I would recommend Podium. I would recommend Openphone paired with Nicejob for reviews. In my opinion, you will get all the features of the Podium for 1/5 the price and the product is way better. I honestly dont see any reason people would choose Podium.

Only small thing Podium does is brings potentially several softwears to gether. But it just didnt work in my case so I dont know if thats possible. We did use it for 6 months.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use it as a text messaging platform with our customers. It integrates with our POS system named the Edge and of course we are using it to build our Google reviews. Also, we have began using the campaign feauture and I am very disappointed with it. I know there is a problem with AT&T customers but we should have a lesser charge per month. I have 17k users and the last campaign reached about 1400. The worst of it is that it is always a challenge to get support. We should have a singular person who we can reach when there is an issue.

Likelihood to Recommend

Excellent for asking for Google reviews.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Podium currently just to text customers, however, I'd like if we could use their phone service too (assuming you can call using your personal phone but under the podium #). I don't work on commission so I would prefer if customers weren't calling/texting my personal line after I clock out. With Podium, it's an app on my phone so I can still access text messages from customers at home if it is an emergency. I sell to customers who text in using our "chat system" on the website & it allows us to see what page the consumer was engaged on when they texted us. A lot of times we will get messages like "what is the price for this item?" & we can click the link shown in the chat to see what item they were looking at-it's really convenient! We have text lines for each of our locations, & although they all have a different phone #, on the business side we can see all messages from all locations at once & easily transfer them between locations since we do have two different types of stores with different merchandise, & a main location with the most inventory options in case someone texts into the incorrect location. You can see a leaderboard of all users & how many messages they have sent or how quickly they answered incoming messages which is super fun.

Likelihood to Recommend

Podium is very appropriate for answering website inquiries in real time, setting appointments with customers, or making a sale over the phone (you can also easily & safely send payment links & reminders for them if a customer does not pay right away). You can send out review invites as well as choose other like companies to compare review scores amongst weekly, monthly, & all time. Team members can make friendly competitions of who has sent out the most messages within a given period & employers can set goals & even rewards for sending out a certain number of review invites! When someone is out, a partner can easily jump in & read the prior conversation for context as well as any previous engagement that the customer made with the store as history is saved from the very first interaction & deleting a conversation is not so simple. It is not great for private conversations as all users can see all activity so you may want to make your customer aware (as well as periodically remind employees) that anything they send can be seen by the whole company!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I intended to use it to get reviews for my two e-commerce websites. I scheduled an appointment to get started. I asked a question about using it for both websites, and the person never got back to me. I asked the sales representative to help and got no help. In my experience, I received nothing from the service and still paid. In my experience, I have called four times asking for a refund and never got a response. I feel this is a terrible company.

Likelihood to Recommend

The service is probably good if the client gets training, which I never got.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I was hopeful about the service. I have a virtual assistant outside the country, and he always had issues sending texts to our clients. The idea was to have my assistant log in to Podium to send those texts. We really tried to work the service into our follow-up contacts with our clients. After many months (maybe a year), we tried to cancel the service because we did not feel we were getting the value for the $500-ish monthly charge. We were then given the option to go down to a lower-tier service for about half that amount. (Side note: We should have been on THAT program from the beginning.) So we gave that a try for a while. In the end, we decided that we were not even getting the value out of THAT lower-tier service. We tried to cancel, but in my experience, we were told this was an ANNUAL service, and we had to keep paying for a full year (for a service we wanted to cancel). It feels like I tried to cancel my cell phone but was told, "You can cancel your phone... but you have to pay full price for the next 12 months."

Likelihood to Recommend

I have NO issue with the technical aspects of the program. To be fair, it works as advertised. My issue is with how they are run as a business. In my experience, the accounting department got my bill wrong several times and never in my favor. In my experience, they would not allow me to cancel the service without paying them for a YEAR into the future for a service I no longer wanted.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company acquired this service as its parter with our dealer program. We had the miss-fortune to encounter massive issues within the platform and anxiety cripples when you know you have a contract for a year. This review is not intended to harm the company but to help them understand from the customer's stand point how they are lacking, and also to offer future customer's of podium understand what they are in for. First of all Installation was a nightmare, it took them a full month to properly onboard, I was asking for help via email and support was copying and pasting previous emails, or they were setting me up in a call with sales team to ask me to upgrade my plan, Huh?...

The account manager we were supposed to get never reached out until we started asking to cancel the service. After this they allocated a new person which was super helpful creating cases to all the issues we were finding a long the way.

<ul><li> Campaigns tab has a massive issue when downloading the results of each TXT campaign the columns do not migrate to what you see on the portal.</li><li>Automated inbox rules are fully useless, first they can't be customized and second of all they do not drive incoming traffic correctly to each bucket.</li><li>Inbox is impossible to organize all of your customer will be dumbed in one bucket.</li><li>Phone number can't be linked to current company phone some clients mentioned they see it as a Spam Contact form lead connections glitch massively.</li><li>Our website its on Wordpress and we had to constantly check if the leads were coming in. As of today we don't know how many customers we lost. Although our volume wasn't huge we did get a customer emailing saying he submitted the form and no one contacted him. Critical issue. </li><li> The use case for the reviews tab its pointless as anyone can send the link for their GMB review tab. Podium should consider customizable micro-sites to make it branded and avoid bad reviews. </li><li> Once a customer's information its uploaded into the system it CAN'T be modified nor deleted. We don't know how many of our customers went through this mix up hence why we were very careful with campaigns. We notices two clients having mixed up information. So when Automating a text it was another's client name but their phone and name were correct. Critical issue to call a client a different name just because of an error of automation.</li><ul><li>Templates where very useful but had to use as we manually had to review that the issue mentioned above was not interfering with the data of the customer and their name </li></ul></ul><span style="letter-spacing: -0.6px; word-spacing: -0.75px;">Hope customer's or even Podium finds this helpful</span>

Likelihood to Recommend

They sales team, they deserve the credit they do know how to sell a premium service with a low class product and customer service.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Podium for text messages from customers who go to our website, review links to Facebook and Google and intra-office-to-field-technicians communication. This solved our problem of not getting enough reviews on Google that we needed. We don't advertise at all, so we needed our Google numbers up. We also use it to text our customers who want text messages only. For us in the office, it creates a lot more work than we think it's worth, it's very hard to keep up with incoming text messages when we also have so many phone calls, tons of emails and only 6 people to answer phones.

Likelihood to Recommend

For our small office, it requires one person to constantly monitor and it is way too time consuming. That one person notifies the others when they are assigned a customer.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Podium to contact customers about various aspects of their project including initial deposit collection, scheduling their installation, final payment if not collected at completion, and go back/warranty work. We also use it for chat functions on our website and managing FB messages.

Likelihood to Recommend

Companies wanting to manage customer messages and payments.