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
Trustpilot
Score 5.9 out of 10
N/A
Trustpilot, headquartered in Copenhagen, offers their customer review platform to help businesses gather more online reviews and merge their online profile with feedback from their top customers and bring customer reviews to other high visibility platforms (e.g. Google).
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
TrustPilot cannot be trusted. They have consistently removed reviews since I started with them. At first I thought it was a one or two off situation. We recently launched an "ask for reviews" initiative and got several positive reviews and TrustPilot removed all of them, without recourse. This hurts us really badly and initiates drawn-out emails with our customers. TrustPilot is wrong about legitimate reviews and has no clean way to resolve that. They hurt our customer relationships more than helped.
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 website UI allows for fluid visualizations and analysis of the review data.
Their website widget integrates well with the website allowing us to display reviews dynamically.
They have pretty advanced integrations with Google SERPs where you can actually have your TP review show up instead of your Google review, which can have benefits.
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.
It would be good to have more control over invalid reviews.
It would be good if buyers were required to contact the company to express their concerns before doing it on the reviews sites because many times a negative impression is caused by a misunderstanding and other potential buyers are not helped by being exposed to this misinformation.
Ideally, the data could be integrated into our website easier.
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.
I've rarely had issues and needed support. During the implementation phase we relied on their support heavily and they were very knowledgeable, responsive and helpful. Any questions I've had have been answered promptly by my account manager. They also have a great knowledgebase for self-service support.
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 also evaluated Bazaarvoice when considering adding customer reviews. Completing a tax return takes time and energy from our customers. We did not want them to fill out a lengthy questionnaire-type review. We wanted to make the review process as simple as possible. Bazaarvoice seemed to be well-suited for retail brands but not for finance. I had used Bazaarvoice at a previous employer and implementing the review stars in our Google ads was a lengthier process back then. It may have changed now. The review stars automatically appeared in our Google ads after we reached 100 reviews. Implementing Trustpilot into our tech stack was a much easier process as well.
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.
