Podium

The ease of use is great, I love taking the conversation from the website to texting, and it's great for that. It also makes it pretty easy to request reviews, and so that is great.

It feels really expensive to me. At this point I might be able to get similar functionality for significantly less money, but nonetheless, because we've made the investment in it and trained our team on it, I selfishly don't want to have to deplore another program and do another batch of training.

Mostly worked well and had pretty good interface with website for chat as well

Tried to cancel this and was not allowed. Went through all kinds of hoops including a mandatory "screen share" by our account rep trying to keep us which made it worse. You CANNOT call or write in and cancel ever! They have their methods and basically won't let you out of a contract. We canceled ours finally after the screen share, the hard close from two different people to keep paying and then still got billed since they had our credit card. I would never recommend such a company. I have NEVER heard of someone NOT taking written notice well in advance to close a monthly contract. We did finally get it resolved to only pay an additional 9 days past when we asked for it to be closed, but its 9 days of our money.

One of the poorest experiences i have had in 32 years of the retail business trying to cancel something. Mandatory screen share and hard sell to stay - Simply unbelievable

What I like most about Podium is its ease of not only use but training anybody new. We are a growing company hiring annually now more and more and Podium is by far the easiest trained software that we use. It's not only self-efficient but training is clean, straight-forward, and it's beyond user-friendly.

There are at this stage in the game a lot of add on's that you can certainly do with Podium. It goes from a very low cost to mid-range cost quickly as you realize you really do need and want all the bells and whistles that Podium can offer. It's not so much that it is a negative, but it does become a challenge sometimes when having to pitch a wonderful new feature of Podium to your decision-makers when the words "and it cost ---- extra" comes into play.