Podium vs. Text Request

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

Text Request makes it simple to communicate with your team, clients and their teams. We can send messages and they can respond as quickly as needed and all team members have access to the responses so it makes it easy for us to help our clients and their customers. It does not integrate with Service Monster so I don't use TR for my service businesses, only my scheduling center. Easy way to communicate, ask for payments and reviews and keep conversations going.

• 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!

• text clients quickly and efficiently
• Allow all team members to communicate with all clients and keep the conversation going
• Templates to easily send regular texts
• Customer service is better than excellent!

• 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

• I think so far the only improvement I could suggest would be to be able to "un-send" a text within like 30 secs in case you send something out incorrectly.
• Maybe adding more emojis
• When sending a file make the size of the pic they see bigger

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

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.

Text Request is very user friendly. I started using the Text Request platform on Day 1 without any specific instructions and I was able to figure it out very easily!

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

I have never used the support

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.

Zipwhip was our company's go-to text app for years. There is NOTHING that would compete with Text Request. It was so behind it's time. Besides charging for each word typed, the way we needed to use the application just did not fit our needs. We used Zipwhip for at least 5 years and it did not feel like they updated to fit our business needs nor did they implement any strategies that could help our company.

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

• That is not something we see from an office standpoint. This is something that our Headquarters would keep track of.
• What I can say is that the amount of patients being scheduled after implementing TR has been in an upward trend.
• Also patients that missed their appointments are more likely to reschedule when being able to do so with just a text message

Incentivized