Podium vs. ReviewTrackers

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

If you're on a tight budget, Review Trackers is a great choice. There are a lot of expensive solutions out there, but Review Trackers is very affordable, even for small businesses. Make sure that Review Trackers will pull reviews from sources specific to your industry. I'm in the automotive industry, so Review Trackers will pull reviews from Cars.com, Edmunds, and other auto specific review sites.

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!

• Ease of tracking - everything about a review is on a dashboard.
• Easy to respond - at the click of a link, we can respond immediately.
• Ease of Reporting - reviews are able to be filtered and reported.
• Reliability - we are able to see reviews come in at a timely manner.
• Informative - we can see where the reviews come from even when the same review is pasted on several directories.

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.

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• Implementation was a bit of a pain. I personally had to do a good bit of work to ensure that all web properties were being tracked for each entity.
• Sentiment analysis is still in beta.
• Menu navigation doesn't always make sense.

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

No complaints. For a great price, we get exactly what we need out of it. Templates for review requests, as well as the ability to monitor the requests coming in and what our patients are saying about our services. It also gives the patients easy access to a direct link to review sites.

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 was super easy to access the dashboard and view everything that was going on. I also love the review request template ... it's great at the end of the week starting to see reviews come in.

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

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

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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

They are always there when I need them, and there has never been an issue with the support team. They are prompt with their responses and always very polite and eager to help me out. I also frequently have them asking me if there is anything additional they can do, which I greatly appreciate

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

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LOVE REVIEW TRACKERS.

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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.

New Brand was a LOT more expensive and really didn't provide much more than what Review Trackers does. They did, however, have a "heatmap" that highlighted popular words used in reviews. That was helpful to see a snapshot of what types of things people are reviewing on our restaurants. They lost their contract with Yelp towards the end, but didn't offer us any sort of discount for no longer pulling Yelp reviews for us. That was the last straw. We get a ton of Yelp reviews, so having to find those ourselves while still paying top dollar for the platform was ridiculous

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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

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• 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

• ReviewTrackers has met each expectation we have set with ease. We've been able to maintain a more visible presence in the public review space, showing our past and potential guests we are engaged and take their feedback seriously.
• We are able to set goals for our properties to try and receive a higher score year over year for specific platforms and this wouldn't be possible without ReviewTrackers ability to have the entirety of each property's historical data.

Incentivized