Podium Review

What do you like best about Podium?

What I enjoy most about Podium is the ability to create, save, and send out draft messages! It is incredibly important from an efficiency standpoint that we are able to send out mass messages that still sound and feel personal. It has been easy to implement these drafted messages into our day-to-day tasks, and has made sending follow up messages and review invitations significantly easier. We frequently use these functions, at a minimum of 3-5 times per month!

What do you dislike about Podium?

One of the only downsides about Podium that I have noticed while using it is the fact that all employees of our location receive notifications from every message sent in to us, even if it does not pertain to our specific department. For example, all Sales Professionals will still receive notifications pertaining to the Repair Department, and vice versa.

What problems is Podium solving and how is that benefiting you?

To be quite honest, I am not aware of any problems that Podium is solving at the moment. However, I am sure that the developers at Podium are indeed doing so. I am sure that if there are security concerns, they are addressing it, and that will always benefit my company.

What do you like best about Podium?

Podium is a highly effective tool for customer communication, especially for managing texting and messaging interactions. It allows for seamless engagement with customers without the need for traditional phone calls, which can be time-consuming and disruptive. By streamlining communications into one platform, Podium helps improve response times and ensures that messages are clear and organized. It’s especially useful for businesses that want to maintain high-touch customer interactions efficiently.

What do you dislike about Podium?

While Podium offers helpful texting and messaging tools for customer communication, its service has significant drawbacks. Texting can be unreliable, and any service interruptions are often blamed on the customer, even when they may result from Podium's third-party vendors. Setting up their phone system was challenging and far from streamlined, adding unnecessary frustration to the onboarding process.

In cases where issues arise, be prepared to invest considerable time—sometimes up to 8 hours—assisting Podium’s tech support in troubleshooting their own software problems. For example, when they recently sent three cordless phones, only one worked. After multiple troubleshooting attempts and hours of my time, they proposed using FaceTime to continue diagnosing the problem—a clear sign that the phones hadn’t been properly configured before shipment.

Based on my experience, I cannot recommend Podium’s phone service. The setup has been extremely cumbersome, and their technical support lacks the expertise and responsiveness needed to resolve these issues efficiently.

What problems is Podium solving and how is that benefiting you?

Responding to consultation requests. Folloup and scheduling installation of products.

What do you like best about Podium?

Podium makes writing sales remotely so easy, it's almost a preferred method for our customers. Sending secured payment links is easy, managing daily sales is a breeze, and the texting feature is superb; creating text campaigns is easy kind of fun. If your brain is fried from other work, their new AI writing tool helps get things started for you.

What do you dislike about Podium?

The search function for searching messages is weak and often does not find what I am looking for, and it would be most helpful if the images customers send us could be compiled into one place, becuase often we get pictures sent to us but they get lost over time.

What problems is Podium solving and how is that benefiting you?

Podium saves us time at the business, and it saves our customers' time outside. It tracks reviews, sends reminders, and tracks daily sales automatically. It saves our customer's time by allowing us to text them as an official business, and allows peiople who are in a hurry to pay on their own time by sending them payment links.

What do you like best about Podium?

We use Podium in a retail setting to keep in contact with Customers and Prospects. We have one account for the store that I manage. I can easily inspect all communications and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Customers love receiving texts and texting from a computer is quick and easy. I send most quotes through Podium with the ability to attach files. I also like how Podium is linked to data from the company so that it will populate easily with contacts. We use Podium all day long - every day. It is essential to our store functions. Notifications from incoming texts are very helpful in not missing new business.

What do you dislike about Podium?

Templates are limited and I can't put a standard footer on all texts (but this may be a function of limitations placed by my company rather than Podium).

What problems is Podium solving and how is that benefiting you?

Communication with Prospects; communication with Customers; transparency and cooperation among the sales team. Podium is an essential part of our functioning.

What do you like best about Podium?

Podium is very easy to use and very effective. It is the best way to contact people and have them contact us directly. The use of templates is very useful in sending out similar messages to many people. I have it on my computer and my phone. We send the links for Google reviews and we can respond directly to those review from Podium.

What do you dislike about Podium?

Sometimes the website doesn't give a notification until later. And sometimes it will say there is an unread message when there is nothing there. But a good refresh every once in a while gets it going again.

What problems is Podium solving and how is that benefiting you?

Podium solves the problem of the dificulty of people getting ahold of us. The phone team is in a different city and people want to talk directly to our store. Podium solves that problem where we can communicate and there is a centralized history of the communications.

What do you like best about Podium?

Podium is a communication platform that allows our team to talk to our customers in a timely and professional way - our team uses this to interact with our customers each and every day to provide the best customer service possible! This platform gives us access to text our customers, send out review requests, and even capture their payments in a safe and efficient way. All of our new hires can easily catch on to the operation of this platform. Podium is implemented into our standard operation procedures across the departments who interact with customers. Not to mention, the customer service that we receive from this platform is always great! The integration process was simple, easy, and worry free! Podium greatly improved our operations and the most important part, has allowed us to communicate with customers in an effective way! I would highly recommend this service to anyone who is interested in need.

What do you dislike about Podium?

At times there are outages or delays in the service, as any technology may experience, but this is very rare and communicated well with our team when there may any down time with the platform.

What problems is Podium solving and how is that benefiting you?

Podium is allowing us to have great and timely communication with our customers. Customers are able to connect with us via text which allows us to repsond in a timely manner since our entire team has access to this - it not just a standard phone extension or email directly to one employee.

What do you like best about Podium?

Podium is very easy to use. Very easy to navigate through the application and find what you are looking for. Anytime there is an issue or problem i am unsure on how to solve, i simply click to chat with customer service and they solve the problem or point me in the right direction. It is used everyday, since there are sooo many features. I even secretly love the option of emojis. Another fantatic feature are stored templates. Talk about making life eastier.

What do you dislike about Podium?

Sometimes Podium is a bit slow to load all of our leads, but i feel as though it is because we have sooo many leads and lots of correspondence back and forth.

What problems is Podium solving and how is that benefiting you?

Getting in contact with hard to reach customers. People are weary of answering their phone to unfamiliar phone calls, but typically don't mind texting. It's much mor convenient to text. I love that i receive an email notification whenever a prospect texts back!

What do you like best about Podium?

I like that I can text customers and message our team individually or by groups in the same platform. I love that every call and text is recorded in Podium. It makes it easy to see what other employees have said to a customer and be in the know. I also enjoy the reporting to see how we are doing with our response time. Podium also allows us to efficiently respond to customer reviews, saving time by preventing us from going to another platform. I use Podium several times a day, every day. When I had to reach out to customer support for assistance, they were very attentive to my needs. It is nicely integrated with our reviews and makes sending out promotions easy.

What do you dislike about Podium?

I wish we could have the response time paused during non-office hours. I don't like that an unanswered call or text after hours counts against us until it is replied to the next day when we open.

What problems is Podium solving and how is that benefiting you?

Podium is solving our needs for a customer communication platform as well as using it for reviews, team communication, and reporting.

What do you like best about Podium?

Podium is a reflection of how easy it can be to consolidate everything your business needs in one place. I am a huge fan of the communication aspect of Podium. It's beyond easy to connect with potential and existing clientelle. I love the bulk messaging feature which helps me keep my clients in the loop of special offers and deals our company offers periodically. My favorite feature is the contact list. Having the ability to keep my business contacts separate from my person contacts is a life saver! 10/10 Recommend this software!

What do you dislike about Podium?

I won't say anything about Podium unhelpful. I will say, incorperating an option for a questionare landing page would be great. Letting a potential client click a link that will bring them to a Podium via Business landing page to answer qualifying questions would be a great add. This is a good way for clients to swifly communicate when they do not have time available for a phone call with a rep or specialist.

All in all great software!

What problems is Podium solving and how is that benefiting you?

It honestly is solving all of our client communication issues. Making sure we are timely and well responsive to our customers with a click of a button.

What do you like best about Podium?

Podium is easy to use for our text messages from our customer base. The messages are easy to sort and see which ones have been answered and which ones are new. Our whole team can read the text messages at the same time. Podium has a feature where it shows if someone else is responding so customers don't get duplicate messages from the team. We have multiple inboxes on Podium for different groups within our organization, keeping tasks easily assigned to the correct groups. We use Podium all day every day and it's made communicating so much easier with our clients. There is also an instant message feature to be used for internal communications which is great that we don't have to stay logged into multiple programs.

What do you dislike about Podium?

My only complaint was a recent release that completely changed the user interface with no notice. If there was notice, it was easy to miss. My whole team was in disarray that day.

What problems is Podium solving and how is that benefiting you?

Podium solves our chat and text issues with our guests. It's been an easy to use program to solve this daunting issue.