Why should you look for a Podium alternative?
If you are reading this, we are assuming that Podium is not cutting it for you. We get it, in our experience, here are some of the reasons why customers are actively looking for a Podium alternative.
- Below-average support: Running a business isn’t an easy task, you have 10 things you need to look at to ensure smooth running. In such a high-stakes situation if the software you trusted to automate business processes falters, it can cause a significant business impact what’s even worse is when you don’t get immediate support to solve your problem. This is just one of the many reviews for Podium that demonstrates below-average support.
“The customer support could be better and more knowledgeable. The company is growing fast and they have a lot of new people who do not know the product.” - Complicated Pricing: Well it’s not exactly complicated, but it doesn’t make complete sense mainly because it’s not value for money as the price really doesn’t justify the features they offer
For example, their ‘Essentials’ package starts at $249 and only offers dashboard access to 3 team members and manages 1000 contacts. Many other alternatives offer unlimited member access and contact management at the same price with a hoard of unique features. Here’s what one of their customers has to say about their pricing:
“The least desirable component of this platform is cost, especially if you happen to be looking at it as a platform to deploy for use with multiple locations. We were a 2 store implementation, so higher cost, but not large enough for volume pricing leverage. the interface for synchronizing contact database information was not overly straightforward”
“Very expensive. We loved the product but not the price.” - Cancellation: If you decide that you no longer want to use a software, your exit should be smooth and without any hassles. Exits also dictate customer experience. However, if you ever decide that you want to cancel your plan with Podium, you may have to jump through many hoops, before it finally happens. For example,
“Trying to cancel with Podium is the worst experience we’ve ever had with a company. My partner had to pretend to be a new client prospect to get Podium to help us because they will dodge and outright ignore correspondences about cancelling service. They’ve admitted their issues and told us they are letting us out of the 1-yr contract, yet they are still charging our credit card each month. We have finally had to take the issue up with our credit card company” - Limited Features: Podium offers a decent set of features but for the price, they should be offering a lot more! Essential texting features such as broadcast texting is limited and group texting feature does not even exist.
“Cannot be sent to multiple people. For example, there are times when I need to send a message to a husband and wife, I can’t do that via podium, so I am forced to go to my cell phone, which is not ideal for my job title.”So then what are some of the alternatives that you should consider?
- Below-average support: Running a business isn’t an easy task, you have 10 things you need to look at to ensure smooth running. In such a high-stakes situation if the software you trusted to automate business processes falters, it can cause a significant business impact what’s even worse is when you don’t get immediate support to solve your problem. This is just one of the many reviews for Podium that demonstrates below-average support.
Top Podium Alternatives
- Emitrr
- Weave
- Birdeye
- Chekkit
Let’s look at how these alternatives compare with Podium vis-a-vis: Features, Pricing, Reviews, and Support.
1. Features
As discussed above one of the major reasons customers look for a podium alternative is the lack of features the product offers, which most people feel don’t do justice to the price they pay, here’s a quick breakdown–
2. Pricing
Pricing is undoubtedly a strong determining factor to narrow down on a service. Pricing goes hand in hand with features. Even if sometimes the price is high, but the service offers quality features one may decide to go with it. Here we’ve compiled for you the monthly subscription prices for the top Podium alternatives.
3. Reviews
The best way to determine if a particular software is the one for you is to go through its reviews. What your peers have to say about a certain product can give you a peek into what it will look like for you as well. Here we have compiled for you some of the reviews for Podium and its alternatives.
Podium reviews:
Comment: Podium can be a good software if it works properly. If you however have a bad experience, getting away from their contract is going to be troublesome.
Emitrr Reviews:
Comment: Emitrr offers great value for money for the wide array of features it offers. Any queries/requests by the customers are quickly addressed by the team and resolved, thus ensuring an impeccable customer experience.
Weave Reviews:
Comment: While the product itself has good reviews, Weave’s customer service and Support take a serious hit! Weave also misses out on some important texting features such as group texting and missed-call to text and is definitely priced at a premium.
Birdeye reviews:
Comment: Birdeye’s review management feature is usually the star of the show, but if somehow it fails to perform getting out of the contract is a nightmare. Birdeye also lacks important texting features such as group texting and missed call to texts along with 24/7 support.
Chekkit Review:
Comment: Chekkit is a popular Podium alternative because it offers similar features at a better price. Customers are also usually satisfied with their customer service. However, they do lack some advanced texting features such as bulk messaging which is essential for every business.
4. Support
Podium support
Podium provides support in the form of Chat, text, and call ( 6AM to 6PM) and a knowledge base.
Podium has a rating of 4.2 for Customer service on Capterra
Emitrr support
Emitrr provides 24/7 support in the form of calls, messages, chats, emails (Tickets), and a knowledge base.
Emitrr has a rating of 4.9 for Customer Service on Capeterra
Weave support
Weave offers support in the form of calls (available from 6 am to 6 pm), chat, and a knowledge base.
Weave has a rating of 3.6 on Capterra for Customer Service
Birdeye support
Birdeye offers support in the form of ticket creation, knowledge base, and case creation.
Birdeye has a rating of 4.7 on Capterra for Customer Service
Chekkit Support
Chekkit offers support in the form of Webchat, Phone and Email.
Chekkit has a rating of 4.9 on Capterra for Customer Service
A summary of Support features for Podium Alternatives can be found in this table:
Emitrr vs Podium
Here’s a comparison table between Emitr and Podium summarizing the criterias we discussed above:
Why is Emitrr the best Podium alternative?
Emitrr like Podium is a complete customer interaction tool. Some of the features that both Emitrr and Podium offer are
- Reviews and Reputation management
- Webchat to text
- Text message Marketing
- Voip
Apart from these mentioned features Emitrr also offers the following features that can help make business communication even more efficient.
- Group Texting: Group texting allows users to text more than one person at a time. A single group thread will be created where all group members can see each other and respond to each other’s text. For eg you can create a group of your team members and send any work related matter on that group. Team members will be able to ask questions and responds to texts. Basically, any team discussion can take place in this group. You can also use groups for different use cases according to your need.
- Automation capabilities: You can easily keep your schedules full at all times by sending automated text and email reminders, follow-up for no-shows and rescheduling, and tracking fast-fill lists. For eg, you can send automated appointment reminders to customers based on the date of the appointment. You can also automate the number of reminders you wish to send.
- Dispositions: When you open a chat, you can easily set a disposition or a status of the chat. Doing so will keep you updated about a certain conversation and will avoid any confusion. You can have your own set of dispositions to choose from.
- Folders: You can put your conversations in different folders based on your needs. You can create as many folders as you like, and even edit or delete folders. Folders help you keep your conversations organized.
- Assign conversations: When you open a conversation, you have the option to assign it to your team members, mark it as read or unread, print the conversation, and even add it to one of your folders.
- Unread filter: The unread filter allows you to view only the unread conversations. Once you’ve read those, you can mark them as closed and they’ll be visible under the closed conversations.
- Metrics: You can track your missed calls (Missed calls, booking requests, dispositions), texting usage (inbound, manual, automated texts), and reviews (summary, review requests) and make informed decisions based on the data.
- Text-enable your landline: Emitrr allows text enabling your landline number. This means that with this landline number, now you can not just make and receive calls but also send and receive text messages. You need not have a separate number for text messaging. Emitrr can text enable your landline number for you.
- Broadcast texting: Podium does not allow broadcast messaging. The feature does not exist. In the case of Emitrr, there is no limit to the number of contacts you wish to send broadcast messages to in one go.
- Translation: This is a very important and unique feature that allows you to communicate with your clients who speak different languages. This feature translates incoming and outgoing messages keeping the language preference of the client in consideration. This further helps build strong relationships between you and your clients.
- Open/close conversations: In Zipwhip, all conversations are docked in one inbox, irrespective of how old or new they are. In Emitrr, your closed conversations will come under a separate inbox, which in turn will make your open conversations inbox more actionable.
- Missed call to text: If for any reason you miss a call you wouldn’t want to miss that customer lead. With Emitrr, the missed call will immediately get converted into a text. This way you can capture your lead and continue the conversation with them via text.
Aside from the texting features some of the other reasons why you should think of switching to Emitrr include:
1. Easy contracts: Unlike Podium’s yearly contract, Emitrr provides a month-to-month contract. If you decide you want to stop the service after a particular month, we can do it for you hassle-free. No binding contracts that will unnecessarily take up your time and money.
2. No additional fee per user: Regardless of the plan you choose with Emitrr you get unlimited user access. Podium, however, charges an additional fee for 3+ users.
3. No additional fee for contacts: You can upload unlimited contacts regardless of your plan of choice with Emitrr. You pay an additional fee for 1000+ contacts with Podium.
What will the migration from Podium to Emitrr look like?
If you’ve come this far, we are assuming you’ve made the decision to switch to Emitrr. We are here to tell you that it is completely an easy process.
Your contacts can be easily migrated from Podium to Emitrr. All you need to do is request Podium to provide you with an export of all your contacts and conversations. Once you have this, you can forward it to us and we will do the rest. That’s it, your migration process is completed.
You will be able to use the business phone number that you were using before with Podium. Nothing will change, expect a lot more cool features that will make customer communication a walk in the park.
Leave a Reply