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
Inter-store Transfers and Inventories have always been an issue, and this program will let you know that something isn't completed and or processed correctly. The ability to set the security levels of staff is a major plus for our business, from Management to RSA's we can allow what information we want them to have. RSA's love the instant feedback of the program from tracking sales and commissions to responding to an incorrect sales order. The system doesn't allow you to forget there may be a problem, which is key to ensuring accuracy of your processes and procedures.
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!
Inventory Control is an important factor. STORIS does a good job of tracking inventory from the order being placed with the vendor to the merchandise being delivered to the customer.
The Sales module provides extensive information pertaining to each purchase from the customer. The comments section of this module, as well as all other modules, is very useful to determine what actions were taken for each sale, along with dates and times of every occurrence.
The Report Builder is an excellent tool to create customized reports relevant to our business' way of obtaining information.
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.
This can be an overwhelming experience if you are new to point of sale software. There is a lot of information and decisions that have to be made as you set up this system. I highly recommend the in person training to get a better idea of the process. With that being said, this is the reason you want a system like this, it gives you the ability, control and support to build a system that meets your needs with the flexibility to make changes as you grow.
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.
We used a similar POS system for 35 years, and it worked quite well for a long time. However, the base technology did not keep up with the changing times, and any updates to the software were slow and expensive. In considering a new solution, we looked at several other companies that had very similar offerings, but felt that STORIS was the most technologically advanced, and had the most to offer.
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.
