Podium vs. Revel Systems

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

Incentivized

When we first started looking at Revel Systems they were more restaurant friendly but they have adapted very well to our retail needs. This system is very easy to operate and maintain, from the POS to the management console. We are able to monitor and run reports for all three of our locations from one URL.

Incentivized

• 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!

• Flexibility - the amount of customization that we tailored to our restaurant is unmatched in the iPad market.
• Online integration - One interface to update all menus.
• Take Out/Delivery/Sit In - able to modify orders as necessary, simple function yet unbeatable.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• More flexible use of discounts and coupons
• More personal dedicated customer service which they went away from and went to general support even though we still pay for elevated customer service access.
• Updates do not always function properly

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

We have put an incredible amount of time into the set up, organization and clean up of this product. Now that it is working and flowing a little better, it would be inconvenient and potentially a bad move if we were to go anywhere else now.

Incentivized

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 can be a bit difficult at the beginning but gets easier as long as you are taking advantage of Revel University, Help, and Customer Service when you get stuck

Incentivized

We haven't had any outages or issues whenever we need it over the last few years of use

Incentivized

It moves quickly and has no issues with delays. Performance is good as it is a web-based tool

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We got excellent support from Revel whenever we needed it. I personally worked with several Revel client support reps, and they were all extremely dedicated and helpful in assisting with any problem we had.

Incentivized

We only had a hard time getting our technicians to remember to send the review invites.

Incentivized

Not for this one

Incentivized

in my opinion, Podium is garbage. I would NOT have selected it except for the person we trusted to help us make a decision for a VoIP solution vehemently recommended it to us, telling us he used it himself for his e-bike shop, and was a 'Podium slut'. I would later learn that he received credits on his own Podium account for referring business to them.

Revel Systems has a much more intuitive user interface and reporting suite than Micros, which was our previous POS system. It's also more equipped to handle multiple types of service than something like Square. We ultimately went with Revel because of the inventory tracking function. We thought it stacked up better against its competitors.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Use of Podium has increased the star rating on various review sites for all of our dealerships using the product.
• Use of Podium has increased the volume of new monthly positive reviews on various review sites for all of our dealerships.
• While we can't measure the impact that positive reviews have on car shoppers, we know that it influences them and we believe that it is a factor for some people in making the decision to visit the dealership. Some customers have come in and said they read our reviews and wanted to give us a shot. Others have even asked for a specific salesperson who's name has come up in positive reviews, without having ever met or spoken with that salesperson.

Incentivized

• Huge ROI, we took time to implement and customize our interface and it now saves us loads of time.
• We have almost endless data to look back on and help make business decisions
• It's easy to train, which reduces labor.

Incentivized