Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a free tool that allows users to promote a Business Profile and business website on Google Search and Maps. With an account, users can see and connect with customers, post updates to the Business Profile, and see how customers are interacting with a business on Google.
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Podium
Score 5.6 out of 10
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Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
The great advantage of Google My Business is that any business that complies with the privacy and authentication policy requirements can access all the functionality tools that help promote the business website through the referral system, exchange of opinions with other users and search engine optimization (SEO).
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
I appreciate how you can select your amenities and customize your profile to stand out in a unique manner
it's super easy to add new products / post updates about your business
The use of pictures is helpful for our customers, we're at the end of a industrial park and it can be tricky to find the front of our office at times. Customers have mentioned our business profile pictures helped them locate us!
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!
Sometimes it's difficult to verify a business if they are an online business and have no brick and mortar location.
I wish there was more control of how the reviews are sorted and a faster ability to dispute completely spammy reviews.
It would be helpful to have more captions in the photos, especially for restaurants because people post food photos without any descriptions and it's difficult to figure out what certain photos represent at times.
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.
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!
Google Business Profile is very user friendly for the users and well as the customers of the company. The customers have an easy time finding the information they need and posting and viewing reviews
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.
Whether it is technical or customer support, Google My Business excels and suffers in the exact same ways that all other branches of Google do. While you'll eventually figure out the issue, the sheer magnitude of the company comes with expected hurdles, wait times, and support you'd come to expect from other large companies.
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.
Before using Google My Business, we have used the "Yext" platform in our company to improve our positioning and get our clients to have an exact location of our company, however, the results were very bad. Yext user support did not offer us good care when we purchased the annual plan. When we made the purchase, we had several doubts to be able to implement this platform in our company, since the configuration of the location and the statistical analysis of search is somewhat complicated, but the Yext user support responded after 48 hours, and This did not allow us to quickly implement this software in our company, so we went to make a refund. Google My Business solved all our doubts, each one of the problems presented during the implementation of Google My Business in my company, were solved in just a few minutes since we received help from an online agent 24 hours a day. The implementation of this software was totally fast thanks to the excellent support we received.
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.
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
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.
