Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month
Text Request
Score 9.7 out of 10
N/A
Text Request is a business texting platform built to ignite customer engagement. It is a plug-and-play messaging solutions to everyday communication problems that enables businesses to connect to customers anytime, anywhere. Text Request is designed to scale from one person handling a few conversations, to thousands of employees sending millions of messages, to custom solutions built on its API.
Podium is well suited if your business needs are mindless Google Business reviews, and not much else. It's NOT appropriate for clients in the real estate industry. It's NOT appropriate for anyone needing a reliable VoIP solution. It should NOT be marketed as a VoIP product, b/c I found it fails MISERABLY in this regard.
Text Request is appropriate for all kinds of scenarios! I really have NOT found a situation where Text Request was not suitable to use to try and reach a patient. We have used TR to contact a patient that we have received a referral from their Primary Doctor and we need to schedule an evaluation, we have used TR for insurance and Billing, we have used TR for contacting patients that missed a visit and to reschedule.
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!
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.
I think so far the only improvement I could suggest would be to be able to "un-send" a text within like 30 secs in case you send something out incorrectly.
Maybe adding more emojis
When sending a file make the size of the pic they see bigger
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.
Text Request is very user friendly. I started using the Text Request platform on Day 1 without any specific instructions and I was able to figure it out very easily!
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.
To be completely candid, I have not used another review software other than Podium. I've worked here for just over 2 years, and our company had just started using Podium. Podium has been useful and successful for our team; therefore, there has not been any reason for me to search for a new company. We are happy with Podium
I use Hatch for my service businesses because they integrate with our CRM tool and Text Request does not. I am NOT a fan - their support is not even half as good as TR but they fill a need that our company has. I like the technology, customer service and ease of use that Text Request gives to us - I just want them to integrate with my CRM! If so, I'd leave Hatch in a heartbeat!
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.
