Podium

We hired Podium to manage our VoIP Phone system among other solutions, such as SMS, and MMS. The VoIP phone service has completely failed basic call quality standards, and it has dropped most of our phone calls. There has been trouble connecting phone calls for every one of our lines. I've reached out to their Support team, and a phone engineer named Mark explained to me that our phone lines were never properly onboarded.

• Podium has had an incredibly NEGATIVE impact on our business. We've lost phone calls, clients, and lost income. We are still evaluating the amount of LOST revenue b/c of this.
• Using Podium has had a NEGATIVE impact on our company's reputation for inability to hold a reliable phone conversation.

Follow Up Boss

Follow Up Boss, JustCall

I manage incoming texts for our company; from making certain consultants see and follow up on messages assigned to them to booking new appointments, advising clients of the status of their item, reaching out to new clients to secure bookings, and answering clients' questions/needs assessing in order to try to book a new appointment or sell the item directly online. Problems Podium addresses? Hmm, I can't think of any. The scope of my use varies... I was the only one of two of our 40+ staff NOT laid off during the covid shutdown. Messages I read/respond to/assign to staff can be as many as 30-40 per day, many needing multiple responses as the client continues questioning.

• Maintaining records of our conversations
• Searchable by name, even if just a few letters
• Clients can reach out to US

• Google Reviews, Google Reviews, Google Reviews. They bring us clients daily.
• In 2019, texting back to clients became too overwhelming for 2 managers to maintain, so I was hired to be the 'digital relationship manager.'

Podium integrates with our POS seamlessly. We are able to deliver custom automated messages to our members for reservation reminders, class reminders, notifications of completed service tickets, notifications of special orders to pick up, membership payment reminders as well as review requests. These custom automated messages save us hours a week and complete necessary communications that would otherwise be forgotten. We appear more professional to our customers while we save on payroll hours. Podium also allows us to cut down on phone calls by inviting our customers to reach out via text instead of time consuming phone calls. We also use the payment function to easily collect payments for special orders and memberships. Since joining Podium 2 years ago our customer reviews have grown exponentially and we currently have a healthy 4.7 star average on Google.

• Automated payment requests via text.
• Automated review requests.
• Website chat

• Podium saves countless labor hours.
• Podium makes us appear more professional to our customers.

AiM

I use Podium currently just to text customers, however, I'd like if we could use their phone service too (assuming you can call using your personal phone but under the podium #). I don't work on commission so I would prefer if customers weren't calling/texting my personal line after I clock out. With Podium, it's an app on my phone so I can still access text messages from customers at home if it is an emergency. I sell to customers who text in using our "chat system" on the website & it allows us to see what page the consumer was engaged on when they texted us. A lot of times we will get messages like "what is the price for this item?" & we can click the link shown in the chat to see what item they were looking at-it's really convenient! We have text lines for each of our locations, & although they all have a different phone #, on the business side we can see all messages from all locations at once & easily transfer them between locations since we do have two different types of stores with different merchandise, & a main location with the most inventory options in case someone texts into the incorrect location. You can see a leaderboard of all users & how many messages they have sent or how quickly they answered incoming messages which is super fun.

• Making sales over the phone & sending payment links for those sales
• Sending Review Invites
• Setting appointments

• Most payment links sent are paid within 6 minutes YTD
• 85% of payment links sent YTD were paid
• 86% of inbound leads YTD were from the webchat

I was hopeful about the service. I have a virtual assistant outside the country, and he always had issues sending texts to our clients. The idea was to have my assistant log in to Podium to send those texts. We really tried to work the service into our follow-up contacts with our clients. After many months (maybe a year), we tried to cancel the service because we did not feel we were getting the value for the $500-ish monthly charge. We were then given the option to go down to a lower-tier service for about half that amount. (Side note: We should have been on THAT program from the beginning.) So we gave that a try for a while. In the end, we decided that we were not even getting the value out of THAT lower-tier service. We tried to cancel, but in my experience, we were told this was an ANNUAL service, and we had to keep paying for a full year (for a service we wanted to cancel). It feels like I tried to cancel my cell phone but was told, "You can cancel your phone... but you have to pay full price for the next 12 months."

• In my opinion, letting me cancel would be nice.
• In my opinion, better support from the accounting department.
• In my opinion, stand behind your service, and let people out if the no longer want it.

• I feel like I wasted $6000

QuickBooks Online