Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month 3 users
PowerReviews
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
PowerReviews helps companies gather ratings and reviews from customers, build Q&A content, syndicate reviews across retailers and search engines, and measure results from these endeavors. The company also offers managed services to help businesses improve customer engagement. The company was founded in 2005 and is based in Chicago.
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
PowerReviews is a great tool for outside customers to leave reviews, however, it is not very friendly for the team that is taking the information, analyzing it, and trying to learn from it. Their website can be much improved for ease of use, additionally, it may just be my server, but it takes a lot of time for information to load, even if the review volume is 0. Just all the baggage that comes with the page loading makes it slow
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!
Their flexibility with moderation options works well for our business. We can moderate immediately, or have PowerReviews handle the first round of moderation.
The back end reporting allows us to export and distribute review content on an automated schedule, helping our product managers get first hand feedback.
Easy for customers to leave reviews, with some customization by product type built in and configurable for our products.
Also relatively easy to drop visitors in to a review form for the exact product they've purchased.
Good value compared to the other major player in the consumer review space.
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!
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.
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.
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.
PowerReviews provided the best balance of price and value. bazaarvoice is popular in the industry but when we compared pricing and features we did not see any compelling reason to spend more. PowerReviews also had the easiest team to work with in the sales process, and that has continued into the engagement.
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.
Custom components and PowerReviews API can display positive customer feedback from an element.
In return for honest reviews and answers to customer questions, we provide genuine and authentic feedback and let customers strain new products.
Syndicated reviews help customers see how products work in real life, which increases trust in our website/business and the products and boosts conversions.
