Podium is a Top in Text Message Marketing Provider

Podium is a leading commercial SMS and MMS texting service focused on helping businesses manage their customer satisfaction reviews and online communications. The relatively new company, founded in 2014, continues to grow in popularity, and has powered 17 million interactions, for 1 in 4 phones, reaching 40,000 businesses to-date.

Podium features technology that compiles a business’s customer reviews from various websites, such as Facebook, Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and others., into a single review management platform. This technology makes it incomparably convenient for business users to obtain and respond quickly to customer reviews.

Podium provides an intuitive user dashboard that enables business online marketing administrators to view their customer reviews posted on the various sites. It shows which consumer reviews are drawing the most attention from visitors to sites where reviews are posted. This helps marketing professionals track and utilize this information and readily locate negative reviews that require immediate response.

While some web-based business reputation management services offer a broad range of text marketing and related services, Podium focuses exclusively on acquisition of reviews and facilitating management of those. The service platform is designed primarily to help businesses increase their numbers of online reviews and provide a robust system for locating and processing those, to magnify their online presence.

Which Businesses Benefit Most from Podium?

Podium is widely acknowledged by industry watchers and software platform product reviewers as one of the best online reputation management platforms available. The company is especially recognized for the comprehensive set of tools it provides for online marketing professionals who need a fast and easy-to-use resource for acquiring and managing customer reviews across all web sources where their business’s reviews are posted for public consumption.

The Podium platform is a valuable resource for business owners and marketing professionals who need a continuously updated supply of information on reviews being published regarding their companies. The kinds of organizations that are likely to obtain the greatest benefit from using the Podium platform are those in need of a robust full-scope online reputation management service.

So, the service is ideal for any business users who need current reports of customer comments on their product and service performance and a comprehensive tool set for proactive management of the process of collecting and responding to online reviews as well as utilizing them for virtually any marketing purposes.

Which Business Solutions are Offered by Podium?

Some online business reputation management platforms offer more broad-ranging arrays of related services, while Podium is focused more exclusively on management of customer reviews. The platform’s management process for acquiring and capitalizing on those marketing opportunities includes solutions for:

Online web marketing platform solutions provided by Podium include:

• Customer Reviews: Appeal to prospective customers through your business’s Facebook and Google reviews by sending out timely text SMS messages.
• Webchat Conversions: Increase your conversions by using a web chat widget on your site that shifts conversations to text.
• Feedback: The feedback feature lets you text customers to ask for experience ratings or get quick responses to other questions about your service.
• Messaging Inbox: Manage your volume of messages in a single centralized inbox for texts, Google messages, Facebook messages, and others.
• Campaigns: Get the marketing campaign results that comes from taking advantage of the 98% open rate that only text message marketing can achieve.
• Video Chat: Realize all the business benefits of superior quality customer communications with state-of-the-art face-to-face video chat
• Teamchat: Use Teamchat for internal interaction with your work group in the proven preferred mode of communication for Millenials and Gen X.
• Textable Number: Use your own free and textable company contact number, to enable your customers to connect with you conveniently with the very easy-to-use Podium App.
• Payments: The Payments tool allows users to collect payments easily by text. This is a feature not offered by many of the platform’s competitors.

Podium Product Features and Benefits

Research shows that today over 90% of consumers prefer texting over talking on the phone and that 99% of text messages are opened. That makes texting arguably the world’s currently most effective business communications tool. Compounding the marketing strength of texting and the comprehensive online text marketing tool set of the uniquely powerful Podium text services platform includes the following features and benefits:

What are Podium’s Greatest Product Strengths?

The value of the Podium services for its customers’ business marketing goals is its effectiveness in helping businesses increase the number of online reviews they receive, thereby expanding their online presence.

The platform is designed to help businesses increase the numbers of online reviews they capture and then use them to magnify their online presence and improve the effectiveness of their virtual marketing. The service works by capturing online customer satisfaction reviews and providing easy-to-use tools for managing responses and for further use of the reviews in marketing applications.

Podium makes it possible for companies to gather more of the reviews published regarding their products and services, connect with web traffic, and much more. The Podium software further tracks an organization’s review scores, enabling Podium users to identify areas in which reviews are improving, and even which workers are asking for more reviews, and which receive more positive reviews. Users can even compare with competitors’ review statistics.

In today’s business environment, driven by digital marketing and the ability to respond quickly to convert negative consumer reviews into opportunities is critical to every brand. Podium stands out among its competitors for the service platform’s ease of use and accessibility for businesses striving to stay in control of their customer relations and brand reputation.

What Makes Podium a Top Business Text Service Provider?

The Podium platform provides all the tools its customers need in order to acquire and manage their online reviews and manage brand reputation by one of the most convenient means in its industry. The superior convenience and simplicity of the Podium service model makes managing all of a business’s online reviews smoother and much less time intensive. The platform also integrates with numerous other business platforms and applications.

Podium’s commercial customers can collect all customer reviews identified across the internet into one central location. This method is incomparably faster and more accurate than the laborious and time-intensive task of continuously switching between review sites. Podium makes quick work of locating spaces where customers are leaving reviews about a business on Google, Facebook, and other popular sites.

The platform enables businesses to manage both positive and negative customer reviews within the critical timeframe for response. This exceptional review processing efficiency helps maximize benefits of such engagement with a commercial customer’s brand. The platform makes it simple to keep up with customers’ published comments and maximize opportunities for amplifying positive and mitigating negative reviews.

The provider’s superior video chat functionality creates a virtual visiting place for customers with sales, customer services, and management reps. The advent of this real-time, face-to-face communications channel as an every-day alternative upgrades the customer experience for Podium users and their customers. As this improvement has naturally translated into revenue increases from higher repeat and referral sales for so many platform users, Podium has grown from its customers’ success. It has also made Podium a must-have for many organizations looking to develop omni-channel communications systems.

Podium customers are assigned a dedicated account manager for close support, to ensure that users are receiving maximum marketing benefit from the specialty marketing software platform. At this level of customer support, the Podium professionals have been able to more deeply understand its customers’ businesses and goals and build strong relationships.

Podium Text Service Security

The commitment to security at Podium is treated as an integral part of the company’s business philosophy and operational policy. The organization’s leadership declares security as the priority in all technology that the company builds and all service processes that it performs.

Their perspective is that creating exceptional customer experiences must include providing the peace of mind for their users that can only come from the confidence that their data is fully protected. In that interest, these are the appendages of the Podium platform security model:

• Security: The company adheres to text marketing industry standards and data security management best practices, including encrypting data both while stored and in transmissions. Practices further include ongoing deployments and integrations, implementing solutions for endpoint detection and response, monitoring and logging for security. Security testing and scanning of applications, real-time incident response, ongoing company-wide security awareness training, and many other measures collectively define the company’s security system.
• Compliance: Podium maintains all the text service platform industry standards and compliance with all national laws and regulatory requirements in countries where the company operates. The organization’s security practices are aligned with the ISO framework for vigilant management of the unique environment of risk in the text communications industry. All Podium customer data is hosted in ISO 27001, SOC2, and HITRUST-compliant data management centers that are also HIPAA-compliant for PHI storage.
• Privacy: With evolving law and regulatory initiatives for privacy protection, Podium maintains its dedication to protecting its customers’ data privacy. The company remains current on new privacy requirements across all its service regions. For more detailed information, read the Podium Privacy Policy.

Strong Cost Savings for Podium Customers

Beginning use of the Podium text marketing service platform is a comparatively quick, easy, and low-cost service startup process for the platform’s customers. The service is scalable along with your business growth and expanding communications needs.

Using the service involves zero to nominal upfront financial risk. Podium offers flexible customized annual and monthly pricing plans, with no initial cost. That means new customers can get started using the service whenever they’re ready. New users can begin using online texting MMS or SMS for their marketing campaigns, review tracking and response, and other online marketing activities without any upfront investment.

Generally, in contrast to any other channels of business communications, text message marketing is now understood to deliver customer loyalty and brand-building benefits at significantly lower costs. This great success of text marketing as an exceedingly popular modern communications tool proves the text mode of business interaction to be today’s ideal approach to increasing customer engagement and improving customer experience.

Those increases translate into cost savings by offsetting needs for more costly marketing endeavors that can be substituted by text SMS and MMS campaigns. So, it makes sense that text is rapidly replacing higher-cost alternatives as one of today’s most essential components of all omnichannel customer communications systems as well as of many small-business, medium-sized, and enterprise-level multimedia marketing campaigns alike.

Another great value-added feature of Podium is the Case Study Template the platform provides for its customers. The template is for Podium customers to use in creating case studies to help their own customers report their successes or issues as users of their products and/or services.

Podium Service Program Pricing and Terms

Podium does not offer standard pricing plan options for its services. The platform provider instead offers its customized pricing alternatives, to build plans based on analysis of your business’s needs.

A Podium specialist will work with you to help you determine which features of the platform will best serve your purposes for your work in your particular industry. The service and pricing analysis also factors your business size, operational structure, number of locations, and other considerations in calculating an appropriate monthly service cost for your company.

The average cost of services from Podium reportedly fall between US $350 – $450 per month, per business location. But, it is recommended that you contact Podium for a formal price quote that is calculated based on your company’s specific needs. The service requires a 12-month contract initially.

The Podium Starter plan is free of charge. The starter plan offers use of a limited number of platform features for several weeks.

Compare Podium to Industry Competitors

The Podium platform works differently than some competitors in its class of text service providers. It does not provide the more extensive array of reputation management services that some companies in this business text platform market subsector do. For example, it does not provide social media management, or crisis management programs. Leaving those specialty service options to others in the industry, Podium focuses on the niche of customer review management and enhanced online customer communications channels in that interest.

Some of Podium’s primary competitors include:

Podium Company Financial Position

The Podium company, headquartered in Lehi, Utah, was founded in 2014. In 2016, the fledgling firm participated in Y Combinator. In 2017, the company obtained Series A Funding. In 2018, the organization opened its Australia Office. In 2018, Podium received Series B Funding and conducted the Grand Opening of its national headquarters.

During 2018, Podium was also listed in Forbes Cloud 100, which recognizes exceptional tech companies worldwide and the company was also named Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startup. In 2019, the company opened its Brazil office, and that same year, Fast Company magazine named Podium one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. Currently, Podium is financially backed by Summit Partners, Accel, Y Combinator, and GV (which was formerly Google Ventures).

It was recently announced that Podium has raised $60 million in funding, led by IVP as well as Podium’s several existing investors, named above.

Podium Customer Comments

Winning awards and being recognized for quality or financial success are all good indicators of the kind of relationships and reputation a company has built with its customers over time. But, hearing directly from customers about their impressions of a company can be the best information to consider in choosing a service provider to fill your company’s needs. Here are just a few of the many helpful Podium customer comments posted:

Jenn Nicole, Marketing Coordinator, Tire Outlet

“We had our call center guys going from Zendesk to Facebook Messenger to the reviews. Now that it’s just all on one system, it makes it a lot easier to manage and make sure that nothing gets forgotten.” (Posted on Podium website.)

Anthony Gilpin, Director of Digital Operations – NewRoads Auto Group

“Podium is money well spent. It gives our staff an easy way to ask for reviews and for customers to engage with us. We’re getting an excellent return on our investment.” (Posted on Podium website.)

Steve Denny, Pierce Flooring and Design

“Podium gives us the ability to schedule services, track work, and send reminders for payment. It’s completely changed the way we do business.” (Posted on Podium website.)

Stacey Hill, Masterpiece Jewelers

“When clients come in, they are already sold on our store because they have read the multitude of reviews we have thanks to Podium.” (Posted on Podium website.)

Case Studies of Podium Solutions

Here are some comments from some Podium customer case studies. These are inspiring accounts of the platform’s commercial customers’ successes. Their leadership’s explanations of how they find exceptionally positive outcomes attributable to their use of the Podium platform software for business reputation management are especially encouraging for prospective Podium users:

Company uses Podium solutions to make five departments work as one. (See Case Study.)

America’s Car-Mart, TJ Pike, Senior Director of Marketing and Digital Experience

America’s Car-Mart decided to form a Customer Experience department. Today, the department fields new incoming leads for all 150 locations. Department reps apply the same level of focus on building long-term relationships that the local market reps do in their communities. When a lead is ready to advance, the Customer Experience team just assigns it to the appropriate associate at the dealership in the prospect’s local area. This is all accomplished within the Podium platform. “This has allowed us to bridge a gap that existed before where we were losing people because they were not comfortable coming in to share their story,” TJ reflected. “They’re able to do that now. And that’s pretty powerful.”

RPM Alamo realizes revenue increases of 20% due to Podium solution. (See Case Study.)

RPM Alamo (a San Antonio property management company), Tony Yraguen, Owner

The business owner had tried two live chat companies. Tony recalled, “The first one was terrible. We turned it off immediately because we couldn’t even really manage it. The second one was clunky– It frustrated the heck out of me and I was on the phone with them every other day trying to figure something out.” Tony then switched to Podium, and virtually overnight the website was transformed. “Conversations that are coming in from Webchat are incredible,” Tony said. “It feels like we’re right in front of them and they’re just coming in to ask simple questions that we can answer.” The result? More viable leads. “We’re increasing the speed of communication, and that converts leads,” Tony said. “Podium is a lead-converting machine.” Improved communications increased customer satisfaction and the numbers of good online reviews. “We’re able to deliver an exceptional customer experience by keeping in contact with them,” Tony explained. The reviews have improved SEO, making it easier for potential customers to find the website,” Tony commented. He estimates, “The overall increase for our business has been at least 20 percent.”

Podium Free Trial

You can try Podium free of charge with Podium Starter. The Starter version of Podium provides many of the tools included in the full-scope Podium platform for regular commercial accounts. The Podium Starter program is only available for users in the United States and Canada.

Customer Resources for Podium Account Holders

• Informative Articles: Free educational articles on topics of interest to Podium users.
• Customer Stories: Shared accounts of customers’ stories about their Podium experience.
• How To Guides: Instructive publications on topics of interest to customers.
• eBooks: In-depth coverage of educational topics for online marketing industry participants.

For More Information About Podium, Santa Monica CA

See Podium functions in operation in the Podium Demo video, to get an introduction into how the platform is used to help companies magnify their online presence, conveniently connect with their customers, and grow their businesses faster.

For additional information about Podium, Santa Monica CA, call (833) 820-2297, or use the company’s online request for contact.