Podium vs. Yext

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

Yext is great for bigger clients. If your client has a franchise of any kind, or even multiple locations, that's an ideal use case. For smaller clients, with one location that doesn't change a lot, Yext isn't as viable, and the effort to update maybe ten or fifteen listings would be worth it.

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!

• Making sure our location data is correctly being understood by Google.
• Taking into account best design principles for our pages layout.
• Staying on top of Google best practices so we don't have to.
• Building a very robust place for us to store all our location information.
• Solid integrations with some of our other key partners, for example Olo, Punchh.
• Being a very good partner for us, our Client Success Manager is exceptional.

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

• Cost. This platform offers a lot of powerful features, but it has an expensive barrier to entry.
• Annual contracts limit flexibility for smaller companies
• The biggest drawback is that you need to keep your subscription active or listings/citation data will revert back to what it was pre-Yext implementation

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.

Yext is pretty easy and straightforward to utilize out of the box. While I work for a digital marketing agency, and this is second nature to me at this point, I do believe the average SMB owner with zero digital marketing experience could be a proficient Yext user within 1 hour or so of usage. It's easy

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 are a larger company with 26 locations, so we may receive additional attention. But they are always quick to answer our calls or emails. I rarely need support as the software delivers as promised. I will say their staff thus far has been very knowledgable about Yext and some lesser-known features. For us, they really understand our needs and why I'd be asking for certain solutions.

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.

Before Yext, I used Moz Local to manage our business listings. Moz Local had fewer listing platforms included with their service. For example, Moz Local did not include Yahoo, and we had issues with inconsistent Yahoo listings. We ultimately switched to Yext and it's been a good fit for us.

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

• Yext has absolutely strengthened our SEO performance and has driven leads that perform extremely well.
• Yext has improved our consultation show rate because all of the clinic information for each of our locations is accurate no matter which website our clients are using to search for the clinic info.
• Yext has allowed our organization to ensure the correct phone numbers are listed across the web, which increased the number of inbound leads that come into our Call Center.

Incentivized