Podium vs. SmileBack

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

Overall product works well but is no longer price competitive compared to others. It also is not as feature rich as its competitors any more. It was one of the first to market which was great but has not done much improvements since. Would love to see ability to measure project CSAT and other integrations.

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!

• Charts and graphs that make it easy for us to share our results internally and also externally when meeting with clients and potential clients.
• SmileBack provides a fun set of metrics that our techs can be proud of -- by measuring customer satisfaction and seeing these surveys (especially those with comments) - it really provides them with satisfaction of a job well done!
• SmileBack makes it easy to search and filter by the client or by tech (agent) or date range.

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

• Honestly, I can't find any room for improvement with SmileBack at this time. For what it is designed to do, it is simple, fast and convenient. Just what we were looking for so our customers can drop us a note and get back to making great beer!

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

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.

Very easy to use, very easy to setup and it's very easy for customers to use and send in their feedback

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

Fantastic support--very honest and direct assistance anytime you need it. My only critique would be for them to "eat more of their own dog food." While I'm sure they've reached out in the past, I can't say that I specifically recall many times that they went out of their way to seek my input as their customer. That said, we rarely needed to contact them as the product works great on its own!

Incentivized

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

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.

Very odd that none of the tools we evaluated are on this list, including some much larger companies. Below are the tools we reviewed with some notes. Ultimately, we recently changed from SmileBack to CustomerThermometer as described below. Crewhu -- They are arguably the biggest name in this space (at least in our industry) and offer a very fully featured platform for customer interaction as well as internal employee interaction. Bizratings -- Also a pretty large name. We did not get to a trial with them. Simplesat -- Very similar to SmileBack in its elegance and simplicity. CustomerThermometer -- This is the vendor we ultimately chose to go to after being with SmileBack for several years. The monthly cost difference for our particular use case made too much sense. While not the most feature-complete tool, there are more options overall in addition to being much cheaper.

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

• We can view how we are doing through the customer's eyes.
• We can see if we are improving our customer service or if it is something that needs to be worked on.
• We have a metric that we like to keep to, and SmileBack helps us track that.

Incentivized