The many complexities of social media and digital marketing provide a hurdle for companies nowadays. Local and small businesses find it more challenging to have an internet presence, control online reviews, and sustain favorable client relationships.
Don’t worry; that is what reputation management tools are made for, and Podium and Birdeye are among the most popular ones on the web. Today, we will guide you through the basics of these tools. Podium vs. Birdeye: Let’s find out which one will help you the most.
What Is Reputation Management Software?
Reputation management tools enable you to compare your brand’s market reputation to your competitors’ while obtaining insights into customer sentiment. It acts as a digital detective by examining the language used in online discussions and reviews to protect your reputation.
What Is Birdeye?
Birdeye assists companies in expanding by building a good online reputation and making sure their clients are happy. Through listings, reviews, and recommendations, the platform assists businesses in converting leads into consumers, who can then be delighted through tickets, surveys, and analytics.
Birdeye offers client acquisition mostly through direct contact and company management listings and pages.
What Is Podium?
Podium is a user-friendly text message marketing platform that focuses on gathering customer feedback and opinions and providing solutions for them. Its Google Business connectivity is unmatched and excellent for managing both online reputation and customer relationships.
Thousands of businesses have benefited from Podium’s all-in-one inbox, which combines reputation management through SMS, web chat, marketing campaigns, and mobile payments into one dashboard.
Birdeye vs Podium: Overview + Key Features
Podium and Birdeye are the main contenders to take into consideration among the different reputation management platforms and customer experience technologies that are now available with varying capabilities. So if you haven’t made up your mind on which one would suit you best, keep reading.
Key Features
Birdeye:
- Listings: Birdeye Listings help you ensure the accuracy of your business information on all websites where they might appear.
- Reviews: Tracks and records customer testimonials and new leads as well as prospective customers who visit your website.
- Pages: You can host each location’s page on your current website or even on a new domain thanks to Birdeye Pages.
- Referrals: Birdeye Referrals help you increase the size of your client base.
- Messaging: Birdeye Messaging assists companies in managing text-based communications on numerous social media sites, including Instagram, Facebook, and Google, to increase leads.
- Webchat: You can provide customer support and increase the number of website visitors who become customers by using Birdeye Webchat. Chat with clients in real-time, use a chatbot to automate frequent question answers, and collect contact information to keep in touch through text messages.
- Surveys: Additional features provided by Birdeye include the ability to create surveys and ask their clients specific questions to gain additional insight into their experiences. This feature has a lot of versatility and allows you to design many different survey types and even audience subsets.
- Benchmarking: Through Birdeye’s competitive benchmarking system, you can observe local rival analysis through client reviews, recognize your position in the market, and make use of competition information to advance.
- Insights: To ensure future success, Birdeye helps you develop action plans based on popular customer insights.
- Ticketing: This useful feature converts unfavorable comments into tickets so that quick action can be taken.
Podium:
- Online Reviews: Podium’s review management is one of its main advantages. It helps you boost your SEO and brings in new clients.
- Messaging Inbox: With its messaging inbox feature, it provides a two-way dialogue solution so that your consumers can feel free to contact you whenever they have a query or issue, and you can answer appropriately. This feature integrates with many networks, including Facebook, ZenDesk, SMS, and Instagram.
- Webchat: This widget provided by Podium connects to the platform’s inbox to enhance customer interaction. A little icon will appear on the screen for customers who visit your website. By clicking and entering their mobile phone number, they can start a live chat.
- TeamChat: Internal teams can communicate using the new TeamChat’s direct and group messaging features, clickable links, attachments, and mentions to make sure the right members are notified when a message is received.
- Your company’s team can communicate with clients and suppliers using the same platform, keeping everything in one place.
- Benchmarking: This feature shows you how your performance is going against your rivals.
- Campaigns: With Podium Campaigns, local company owners can manage SMS opt-in from various points along the consumer journey on a single platform while also centralizing client communications.
The winner: Birdeye offers a bigger amount of review monitoring features, and they are easier to use compared to Podium’s features.
Customer Support
Birdeye: Support is constantly on hand to handle problems, answer emails, and be accessible for meetings or phone conversations. Any query regarding any feature at any time is promptly answered and enthusiastically received. However, a small percentage of their reviews claim a slightly slow response on occasion.
Birdeye also offers a TON of graphic material and tutorials to get used to its features faster. Any doubt you might have is probably already explained there.
Podium: Many Podium clients discovered that Podium’s customer service agents frequently transferred calls to other agents who could not face the problem, requiring customers to explain their circumstances all over again.
The most common complaint about Podium’s support staff is that they would never get back to clients, and if they did, they would never solve the issue. Plus, they affirm that it is difficult or impossible to find someone to pick up the phone.
The winner: Birdeye is hands down the winner in customer support.
Payments
Birdeye: Businesses can use Birdeye Payments to receive payments by SMS. It allows you to securely request and accept payments in real-time during customer interactions and use the Payment Dashboard to quickly and easily keep track of all your transactions. You don’t need to send your client to a different website and begin a separate procedure when payment enters the picture.
Podium: You only need to text the customer to specify their preferred payment method when using Payments from Podium. They are no longer required to make payments through an antiquated method like email or phone tag. Some of the payment features they provide include the following:
- Adaptable Invoices
- Reporting Refunds
- Integration of Bank Account Line Items
- Various Payment Options
- Secure Payments and Fraud Prevention
The winner: Podium is the winner for this one. It offers more payment solutions.
Integrations
Birdeye: Birdeye has integrations with thousands of software systems. Between them, you can find PayPal, Mailchimp, Shopify, Zapier, Zoho, Constant Contact, Hubspot, Twitter, Xero, Pipedrive, and more.
Podium: Podium offers over 180 integrations, such as Shopify, Dentrix, and FareHarbor.
The winner: Birdeye. It has way more integrations than Podium.
Pricing
Birdeye: Birdeye offers a free trial and two paid plans of $299 and $399 monthly. Each extra user incurs a $10 monthly fee.
Podium: Podium also has a 14-day free trial. It offers three paid monthly plans of $249, $409, and $599.
The winner: We have a tie here! We can say they are similar price-wise.
Final Decision: The Winner
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner: Birdeye. We have to say it works better for larger businesses due to its effective SEO and listing services.
Podium has a few more drawbacks than Birdeye, but it makes sense since it’s aimed at smaller businesses. Its ability to provide customers with concise text messages makes getting five-star reviews easier. There are some other distinctions, but reviewers typically believe that using and conducting business with Birdeye is simpler.
FAQs
What Are the Pros of Birdeye and Podium?
Birdeye Pros:
- Great onboarding
- Responsive customer support
- Optimization for search results
- Reports on Google, Facebook, and Yelp success
- Integration with more than 3,000 third-party tools
- Role-based dashboards and adaptable workflows
- Complete Engagement Resources
- AI-powered useful insights
- Access to real-time reviews via mobile or any device and from any location
- Great analytics. To help you make wiser business decisions, you can examine customer feedback data by market, product category, source, and more.
Podium Pros:
- Users of Android and iOS can download Podium. Allowing them to manage their teams everywhere.
- It is time-saving when choosing between reviews. It finds the top-performing sites and calculates average star ratings for quick comparison.
- Messages sent to consumers following a visit can be automated so that you don’t have to do it
- Keeps track of comments left on social media, polls, SMS messages, and other sources
- Increases the online visibility of your business and draws customers for increased growth and productivity
What Are the Cons of Birdeye and Podium?
Birdeye Cons:
- It does not provide features to organize your messages. When you start receiving replies from the mass text messaging option, the messages panel floods
- Integration with self-storage software can be slow
- It is expensive
- The user interface can be buggy. It contains several technical problems that could obstruct your work
Podium Cons:
- Works exclusively with Google Maps and Facebook pages
- Sometimes it can malfunction and have glitches
- Ineffective customer support
- Requires you to pay for any task
Who Are the Main Birdeye and Podium Customers?
Health care, medical practice, construction, and businesses with annual revenues of $1 to $10 million make up the main Birdeye customers. On the Podium side, construction, automotive businesses, and small companies with 10–50 employees are its main customers.
The Wrap-Up
Maintaining your reputation is essential since what is said online will be there forever. Every business wants to increase its clientele and keep a good name. Using reputation management and communication software is one of the most effective methods to achieve this. Birdeye and Podium are among the best software on the market for that. We hope the information delivered today has helped you pick the right one for your business.
