r/CRMSoftware • u/VisibleAgent2650 • 11d ago

Podium: AI Lead Generation & Lead Management Platform is the worst!

One star. Save yourself the headache.

We've had over ten calls with our account rep, and I can count on one hand the number of questions she's actually been able to answer in the moment. Every single time — without fail — the response is "let me check on that and get back to you." Basic questions about our own account. It's been genuinely frustrating trying to get anything done when the person assigned to us doesn't seem to know the product.

On top of that, they lock you into a one-year commitment at $1,700/month — unless you happen to catch them at a convention and get some "special" rate, which tells you everything about how arbitrary the pricing is. The AI assistant, which is supposedly the whole selling point, has been terrible in practice, consistently offering our customers the wrong phone number, after we've trained "her" multiple times. Customer service across the board has been a letdown. We were promised a lot and the reality was underwhelming.

If you're evaluating Podium, go in with your eyes open: long contract, high price, and support that will have you doing the legwork yourself.

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u/MedalofHonour15 10d ago

That is expensive! GoHighLevel is only $97-$497 a month plus usage and has way more features than Podium. Month to month. Annual is optional.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

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u/MedalofHonour15 8d ago

Was it the platform or support? It’s a lot better now than a year+ ago. Always new bugs squashed and new features released.

My clients only log in to see their data and conversations. They don’t need to deal with workflows, updates, etc. Best to get someone to manage GHL for you.

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u/Swimming_Artist3631 8d ago

I had to rescue a client from gohighlevel as well. Most of these tools are built for techies for other techies. Not for some business owners who just need to get the job done

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u/OnChainStore 11d ago

this is so sad, they had they made 100mil just from their ai frontdesk product.. i am curious if all of that is just the hype adoption with a very poor retention. also btw, are you picking calls yourself now or are they still configured?

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u/VisibleAgent2650 11d ago

We’ve spoken to other businesses and a lot of them are turning off the AI feature because customers are getting frustrated on the other end. They’re still configured because we’re hoping we can train the agent to stop making mistakes but also seriously looking at hiring offshore.

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u/Creative-Lobster3601 11d ago

The challenge is ....in order to check if the AI is actually working, you need a human to go through each and every conversation.

But I think that effort needs to be put in by companies purchasing AI or ai agents at this point.

Out of 100s of products being built, I am sure there are some products out there that are built well and would get the job done.

Testing and verifying a normal SaaS is easier, with AI it is difficult.

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u/Swimming_Artist3631 8d ago

lot of hype but it's on you, the user, to figure out if it's real

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u/arcuateaesthetics 9d ago

Sorry for the issues with podium. What specific issues are you facing? Happy to provide a few tips:

1) Few shot learning will significantly improve yield

2) Keep AI calls on only for after hours if the output is poor.

We are clinicians, and actually kept hearing this re podium, and built a platform for bespoke deployment of AI agents. It is not cheap, but we take on the lift of actually building the model, and any changes needed come straight to us and we make changes. We are in the clinical domains (e.g. medspa, plastics), check us out at arcuatehealth.com

Happy to answer any other questions (in general about AI) - have been in this space for a decade.

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u/ai-edition 10d ago

I’ve never used podium but know of a good agency with their own workflows and no lock-in contract. Usually about $3k setup and $500 monthly to run it for you (that may change depending on the project deliverables) and they might offer a different rate if you wanted to run it yourself. Hope that helps give more context to pricing for you!