On the lookout for a new reputation management or customer experience management solution? You might be considering Birdeye and Podium. In this article, we’ll compare Birdeye vs. Podium including:
- An introduction to these solutions and their features
- The pros and cons of each
- Alternatives you should consider for broader customer experience management
Podium vs. Birdeye: An introduction
Birdeye is a well-known reputation management platform that helps businesses grow by automating and simplifying the process of getting more reviews, thereby improving review scores, SEO, and overall reputation. Podium is a lead and communications management platform that makes communicating with customers on their favorite channels easy, creating more leads and driving sales.
Birdeye: Review & reputation management
Birdeye is a review and reputation management platform that helps businesses enhance their online presence and connect with customers. The platform helps businesses get found online, improve their reputation, and connect with customers. Using AI across its suite of tools, users can gather customer feedback, monitor and respond to reviews across platforms, manage online listings, engage with customers on social media, and conduct surveys.
Birdeye also streamlines some aspects of customer experience management. This includes features like AI-powered review generation, which automatically prompts customers to leave feedback, and sentiment analysis, which helps businesses understand trends within their reviews. By automating these tasks, Birdeye frees up businesses to focus on what matters most – building relationships with customers and improving overall experience.
While both Birdeye and Podium offer tools for online reputation management, Birdeye differentiates itself with broader features that can support enterprise businesses with more complex needs. Though most of its customers are small businesses, Birdeye provides additional tools for managing customer interactions across multiple business locations and channels, including social media, listings, and surveys, all on a single platform.
Birdeye: Features overview
Review and listings management
- Birdeye generates and monitors reviews across 200+ sites
- Respond to reviews and address negative feedback promptly from Birdeye’s platform
- Ensure consistent and accurate information about your business across your review site profiles, including Google My Business and Facebook
Surveys & feedback
- Create and share customized surveys with Birdeye’s easy-to-use survey builder
- Build NPS and conversational surveys and save custom templates for your needs
- Track key metrics with survey reporting that includes AI summaries to analyze results at scale
Easily manage customer interactions
- Birdeye’s unified inbox lets users manage all customer interactions, including reviews, social media messages, and survey responses from one place
- Birdeye reviews consistently highlight the platform’s intuitive and easy-to-use interface for businesses of all sizes
Comprehensive platform with AI
- Consolidates review management, surveys, listings management, social media management, and webchat into one platform
- Automates review generation, sentiment analysis, and review responses with AI
- Integrates with many popular business tools including CRMs, marketing automation, calendaring software, and more.
Birdeye: The downsides
Non-automated reporting
- Reports on Birdeye must be run and downloaded manually
- New reviews for your business may not show up in real time, requiring a manual refresh in Birdeye
- In online reviews for Birdeye, users say that reporting and analytics features could be enhanced with more customizable options, especially for social media metrics
Negative feedback in public channels
- Birdeye doesn’t have a channel for issue resolution before feedback becomes public, so you may not have the chance to fix problems before they become negative reviews
- No way to automatically assign customer feedback captured in surveys for a response
- Its primary functionality is to generate, manage, and address public reviews, positive or negative
Not a full customer experience management platform
- Birdeye is a reputation management platform with customer experience management features, but lacks the ability to automatically manage or respond to customer inquiries outside of public reviews
- Birdeye lacks comprehensive features that involve frontline teams and leaders in the CX improvement process, leaving potential revenue growth on the table
Birdeye pros & cons
Pros
- Offers many reputation management solutions, including business listings management for all locations in one place, automated review responses, the ability to turn reviews into customer referrals, etc.
- Supports lead generation with automated referral campaigns and social media management from a centralized dashboard
- Send bulk messages via SMS to offer deals and coupons to subscribers
- Easy to manage with strong customer support
Cons
- Core product doesn’t focus on issue resolution before problems become negative public reviews
- Reports are not comprehensive and must be run and downloaded manually, reducing productivity
- Some users (especially small businesses) find Birdeye to be expensive, with specific negative chatter online about difficulties with contracts and cancellations
Podium: Get more leads and make more money
Podium is a lead generation platform with communication and payments capabilities designed to help local businesses win more leads, manage customer interactions, and simplify transactions. Podium streamlines communication and improves efficiency to drive growth for its customers.
At its core, Podium helps businesses gather customer feedback, manage online reviews, and communicate with customers via text message and webchat. This lets users engage with their customers on their preferred channel, leading to faster response times and improved customer satisfaction. Podium also facilitates online payment collection, making it easier for businesses to get paid.
One of Podium's key features is its ability to centralize all customer messages into a single cross-channel inbox. Text messages, webchats, Google reviews and questions, Facebook messages, and Instagram comments are managed together in one place.
Podium: Features overview
Multiple channels, one inbox
- Podium brings together all customer messages - SMS, webchat, phone calls, Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc. - into a single inbox
- Podium’s focus on text messages improves engagement rates by bringing customer communications to a highly-used channel
- Communicate with customers in any situation and take action to respond
Generate more reviews
- Podium automates review invitations and follow-ups to increase visibility online
- Easy-to-use platform for monitoring reviews across platforms and responding to customer feedback
Capture leads and drive sales everywhere
- Engage website visitors in real time with webchat and chatbots that capture leads
- Podium can aggregate and summarize customer phone calls
- Push deals and promotions across customer channels to drive repeat business
- Podium collects payments directly from its platform, allowing customers to pay on shop floors via bluetooth, through text messages, and more
Automate tasks with AI
- Podium’s AI automates tasks like sending review invitations and responding to reviews, saving businesses time and effort
- Podium’s AI can instantly respond to chat inquiries, hold conversations, schedule appointments, and send marketing messages
- Podium summarizes customer phone calls using AI
Podium: The downsides
More expensive
- Podium is priced higher than its direct competitors
- Podium reviewers on G2 call out difficulties with Podium’s inflexible contracts and cancellation policies
- Limited bulk messages per month make surveying for NPS, CSAT, etc. an add-on cost
Limited reporting
- Outside of a few out-of-the-box reports, Podium’s reporting capabilities are limited
- Podium limits exporting of survey and communications data, making any exploration of your results a challenge on and off the platform
- While great for 1:1 direct communication, Podium does not aggregate customer communications into overall learnings beyond volume reports
Lacks enterprise-level features
- Does not include frontline coaching, listings management, or social media management features
- Critical multi-location features are exclusive to Podium’s highest-level pricing tier
- Podium offers conversational-style surveys only, limiting question types and measurement capabilities
Not built for customer experience management
- While Podium has some customer experience management features, its primary purposes are lead generation and customer communication
- You can resolve immediate issues 1:1, but what do you learn from customer engagements in aggregate?
- Few mechanisms for learning from customer interactions and transforming customer experience
Podium pros & cons
Pros
- Flexible messaging capabilities empower Podium users to customize for mass texts or individual messages based on specific needs and preferences
- Podium has an intuitive, easy-to-use interface
- Respond to customers in real time on their preferred channels from Podium’s centralized platform
Cons
- Reporting and customization options within the platform are limited
- Many users say it’s difficult to get in contact with Podium’s support to resolve issues
- Podium is often more expensive than its competitors
AskNicely: A better alternative for customer experience management
Podium and Birdeye are great for reputation management, but if you want to drive growth with reviews while also understanding your customers to drive more business through better customer experiences, you should consider AskNicely. AskNicely is the only customer experience management platform designed to proactively address customer experience challenges and help get in front of negative reviews before they happen.
AskNicely is a leading Customer Experience Management platform ranked in the top 3 by G2. Our users rave about our easy-to-use platform and our high-quality support. Our platform drives measurable results for customers, who praise our actionable customer insights, customization and flexibility, and positive impact on customer satisfaction drive measurable results.
Getting more reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, and wherever your customers are is a critical part of growing your business. If you want to focus on getting more reviews from your happiest customers, AskNicely can help.
Reputation management, not damage control
Customers who write reviews are your best marketers. But what story will they tell? Automatically identify the right potential reviewers and generate more positive reviews across every review site for your multi-location business with AskNicely. That’s how you supercharge growth.
- Automatically identify satisfied customers based their feedback, then automatically send review requests
- Improve your ratings across Google, Facebook, Yelp, and more
- Showcase five-star experiences on your own site with a single click using AskNicely’s testimonials widget
Better analytics, better insight
Your customer feedback data is like a treasure map to uncover retention, growth, and revenue. Easily turn NPS, CSAT, or other CX measurement programs into customer experience insight with flexible, AI-powered reporting that directly delivers insight you can act on right away.
- Build your CX mission control with all your data in one place, customized for every member of your team from the boardroom to the front line
- Truly understand your customer experience using AI to identify themes from feedback
- Segment data and customize reports any way you like, including by location, service standard, theme, customer profile, and more
Activate your frontline
Responding to direct customer feedback doesn’t help your frontline staff improve service delivery. Celebrate fantastic experiences and identify coaching opportunities directly from the AskNicely platform - that’s how you really transform your business.
- Keep everyone on the team marching towards CX goals with role-based dashboards that customize views for every role and location
- Automatically identify specific opportunities for improvement in CX data, then share coaching playbooks and report cards
- Bring visibility to every breakroom with AskNicely TV, a real-time scoreboard that builds a customer-first culture
To learn more about why AskNicely is the best Customer Experience Management platform, get a demo today.
