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.

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.

When the software works, it really is a nice system. Our issue is that the software never worked. My employees had consistent issues with messages not showing up in the inbox or not receiving notifications when new messages came in. I myself did not receive a single notification for a new message for over a month, and it was still not fixed by the time we finally decided we had enough and switched to another system. I also had to reach out to them weekly to see if my issues have been figured out because they will never reach back out to you about the issues you're having.

Trying to cancel with Podium is the worst experience we've ever had with a company. My partner had to pretend to be a new client prospect to get Podium to help us because they will dodge and outright ignore correspondences about cancelling service. They've admitted their issues, told us they are letting us out of the 1-yr contract, yet they are still charging our credit card each month. We have finally had to take the issue up with our credit card company.

I love that all of our messaging either from different social media sites or from our own website comes to one location! It is really nice that all of our employees have access to this site and because of that, we are able to reply very quickly to messages that come in. I also like that our reviews show up here and we are able to respond to them through the Podium platform rather than needing to go to Google, Facebook, Yelp etc. to find the reviews.

I wish that somehow we were able to consolidate the review notifications so that if we invite someone to review us on google and they write a review, we don't get two separate messages/notifications about it.