Item: Podium
Rating: 1
Author: Tirey Counts

Overall Satisfaction with Podium

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."

Pros and Cons

Pros

In my experience, Send you bill for 11 months after you try to cancel.
In my experience, Charges you annually for a service you use months
In my experience, They are great at billing you for the wrong amount

Cons

They should stand behind their product. I feel if someone cancels, they should be able to cancel.
In my opinion, the accounting department never seems to have their stuff together
In my experience, it is hard to get a human on the phone, unless they are signing you up.

Most Important Features

In my opinion, letting me cancel would be nice.
In my opinion, better support from the accounting department.
In my opinion, stand behind your service, and let people out if the no longer want it.

Return on Investment

I feel like I wasted $6000

Key Insights

Do you think Podium delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Podium's feature set?

Did Podium live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Podium go as expected?

Would you buy Podium again?

Other Software Used

QuickBooks Online

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.

Comments

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Let my people go! How to keep getting billed after you cancel in 3 easy steps.