Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month
Yotpo
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
Yotpo, an eCommerce marketing platform, helps brands accelerate direct-to-consumer growth. The single-platform approach integrates data-driven solutions for reviews, loyalty, SMS marketing, and more. The vendor states that brands with Yotpo are empowered to create smarter, higher-converting experiences that spark and sustain customer relationships. Yotpo integrates with everyday tools including Google, Instagram, top eCommerce platforms, and other tools in the tech stack.
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
If you need an excellent mechanism to collect and publish customer reviews, Yotpo is the best that we have found. We love the feature set that is provided, even if you are using the basic membership to get started. Where it is really good is the collection and managing of reviews. The email request setup is simple and easy to use. The publishing and commenting on reviews can be managed easily in the backend. It syncs up nicely to our website providers, and we have used it on a few different platforms without any problems. The pricing on it is also very competitive when you price it out against so of the other big-name players in the space.
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.
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!
Our organization is very lean and agile and does not have the resources to staff either a Marketing or Customer Service Team member on reviews full time. We know and understand the value of such an individual but are unable to staff a position at this point. This reduces the value of the tool in our eyes.
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 think the platform back end could be easier and more intuitive, but we are able to get around and accomplish what we need to with minimal training or guidance. Specifically, we had complications with trying to do something as simple as sending ourselves test emails and adjusting image sizes pulling from our product catalog so that the review request email images would be clear.
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.
Live chat is always ready to help. Even when they do not have an immediate answer, we hear back from them within a reasonable time frame. Communication from the account manager is great as well. The team has been very supportive in listening to new ideas, needs, and updates based on real-time on-site data.
We use Digital Air Strike at our two GM dealerships because it is one of a small list of reputation management companies authorized by GM as part of their SFE program. Digital Air Strike surveys our customers and invites them to write a review about our dealership. It is not as effective or flexible as Podium so we have been using Podium at those dealerships alongside Digital Air Strike. We also recently started a trial use of ReplyPro which is a service that monitors review sites and writes customized responses to positive reviews and suggested responses to negative reviews. I'd like to see Podium add this as part of their service so we can consolidate 3rd party vendors and manage every aspect of online reputation management from one place.
I have only used one other service prior to Yotpo (I don't remember what it was) and Yotpo outperforms them. Yotpo is really intuitive and easy to navigate/install from a Shopify user perspective. When Pixel union releases their customer review service I may try it out since they are my theme provider and it may integrate more seamlessly.
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
I am glad there are card readers now, sales team members too often try to just send a request instead of taking payment onsite.
It's made capturing messaging leads much easier.
It's worth the cost but if it did a few more things it would be worth a lot more to us. Document signatures, surveying after jobs, even geotagging of photos/reviews for SEO
