locations

+86%

increase in calls from Google listing

+39%

increase in driving directions from Google listing

+30%

increase in web traffic from Google listing

12x

increase in review volume

2,840

reviews collected

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About Mattress City

Locally owned and family operated, Mattress City was founded on the idea that customers should be treated as an extension of your own family. Stewart Patey, the founder and owner of Mattress City, entered the mattress industry in early 2000. Working for three major mattress stores over the next five years, Stewart built his business model and eventually opened Mattress City. Fourteen years later and the brand has five stores in Washington state.

In just four and a half years, Mattress City has seen incredible results with Podium. Starting with just one store, Stewart implemented Podium to help get more reviews and rank higher against competitors online. The results were nearly immediate, and he soon expanded Podium to all five locations. With Podium, Mattress City has collected more than 2,800 reviews, boasts a 4.93 average star rating, and has increased foot traffic, phone calls, and texts to their stores.

“Out of all of the things I’ve done since starting our business 14 years ago, Podium ranks in the top one or two ways we’ve pushed our brand forward into our community,” said Stewart.

The Challenge

Before Podium, Mattress City struggled to get reviews to help their online ranking in Google search–the big box stores were winning with big ad spend to capture more leads online. Furthermore, customers and prospects had to call into the store with every question. Stewart Patey, the owner, described the challenges Mattress City was experiencing this way:

The process to leave a review wasn’t working for customers
“If you don’t get reviews, you’re absolutely going to lose,” said Stewart. “We were doing an exceptional job, but we couldn’t get enough people to figure out how to log into Google and leave a review. It was too difficult to get a review.” Because it was so challenging to leave a review, Mattress City employees were tasked with trying to educate customers on the steps to leave a review. This process was time consuming and often resulted in too few reviews.

Not a big enough budget to compete with the big box stores
“Competing against the big mattress stores as a small, local business is hard. I needed to find creative ways for my business to stand out in the community,” said Stewart. Forced to compete against bigger mattress store brands with ad budgets ranging from $200,000 to $1M, Stewart needed a better way to show up online without breaking the bank.
Customer communication was only possible through phone calls
When a new or returning customer had a mattress question, the only option was to call into the store. Sales reps were required to field the few phone calls that came in, hoping to direct callers into the store to try out a mattress and make a purchase. Marketing efforts relied on emails or direct mail and there wasn’t a good way to capture new leads on the website without a web chat option.

The Podium Solution

With Podium, Mattress City built a better review request process with text, started showing up in the top three organic search results, and implemented Webchat on their website—helping them capture more sales and direct more prospects to their stores in person. Altogether, Mattress City uses Podium to deliver:

An efficient, effective, and results-driven review request program.

Instead of teaching each customer how to leave a review on Google, Mattress City is sending out review requests via text with a link directly to the review site. The process is simple for customers and easy for Mattress City sales reps. And the influx in reviews is helping drive more business. “When we ask our customers what brought them into our store, they always say it was our Google reviews,” said Stewart. “60% of the people that walk into our doors say they read our reviews and they’re ready to buy.”

A higher online rank in organic search results.

It’s too hard to compete against the ad dollars of a big box store. Instead, Mattress City is focused on collecting more reviews to boost their organic search result ranking. And it’s working. “I can’t outspend the number one, two, or three ad spots,” said Stewart. “But what I can afford is something they don’t do and something their employees don’t do because they don’t take it seriously—collect more reviews to boost my organic search ranking.”

An easier way to respond to reviews quickly.

With Podium, Mattress City can stay on top of reviews that are coming in daily. “Podium is the platform that allows me to not only see reviews quickly, but it allows me to respond to reviews,” said Stewart. And with pre-written templates make responding to those reviews even easier.

“Podium makes it super simple to reply to any review. I don’t have to sit down and write everything from scratch. I can go through the templates I’ve customized, tailor them a bit more, and reply quickly to every review,” said Stewart.

An easier way to compete with the big box stores.

Podium is helping Mattress City compete against mattress stores that have been around for 30 – 50 years—outperforming all of them online. “Podium has put me in the forefront of nearly every competitor in my area,” said Stewart. “I truly believe Podium has given me an unfair advantage over my competition in many ways. We compete at a high level with our competitors because of our Podium reviews.”

A more convenient, customer-focused way to connect with leads.

“Initially we thought Podium was just about helping us get reviews from our customers and helping us stand out in that way. But I’ve seen a tremendous increase in customer communication with Podium,” said Stewart.

Podium is helping prospects and customers connect directly to Mattress City through text. This change in communication has reduced the time sales reps traditionally spent on the phone and encouraged prospects who don’t want to phone into the store to simply text a rep instead. “Podium prevents any sort of phone anxiety for the customer because they have the opportunity to click on our Google profile and start a text conversation,” said Stewart. “It’s just a better experience for our customers.”

A better way to capture leads online with Webchat

Webchat is helping Mattress City connect customers with a live sales representative at their closest location. “Podium is fabulous technology. A customer clicks on the Webchat icon on our site and they can ask any question to a rep at the store closest to them,” said Stewart. Webchat messages show up in real time on the sales rep’s phone so they can get back to inquiries quickly. “Now, we actually make sales directly through Webchat. And because we can see customer conversation history, we can pull up an inquiry from months ago and let that person know what they were looking for is back in stock. It’s just awesome—I love it!”

Results & ROI

Since 2018, Mattress City has used Podium to see results like:

→ A 12x increase in reviews—from 2 per month to 12.8 per month

Podium has helped Mattress City collect more consistent reviews. Since implementing text review requests, Mattress City has seen an increase in reviews from just 2 per month to nearly 13 per month.

→ A higher ranking in online search results

With more reviews, Google is pushing Mattress City to the top of search results. “Podium has consistently done what it always has done—given us more reviews for every location,” said Stewart. “And Google has made us more relevant. Now, 92% of the time when someone Googles our store in our area, we are in the top three search results.”

→ 30% increase in website visits from Google

With a high number of reviews for every location and a high average star rating, Mattress City is seeing a 30% increase in website visits from Google. New prospects are finding their Google profile and clicking through to their website more frequently than they were before Podium.

→ 86% increase in clicks-to-call from Google

With Podium, Mattress City is also seeing an increase in clicks-to-call from Google. Showing up higher in search results has helped them increase direct calls to their stores by 86%.

→ 39% increase in driving directions clicks from Google

As new prospects find Mattress City online, clicks and calls aren’t the only metrics increasing. The number of clicks on driving directions from Google has increased by 39% since using Podium to increase reviews.

→ 2,840 total reviews collected with a 4.93 average rating

With an average star rating of 4.93, Mattress City has collected more than 2,840 reviews for their five locations. Review requests are sent via text, making it easy for customers to click a link and leave a review.

“Podium is no longer an expense. It’s an investment. We wouldn’t be where we are today without it… Some companies are just surviving. Mattress City with Podium is thriving. Every business today needs to be using Podium.”

Podium can help your business too. Get started now.

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4 Benefits of VoIP Phone Systems for Retail Businesses

2,000+

new leads

10+

hours saved per week

This is a fake video section for testing.

About Duerden’s Appliance & Mattress

Duerden’s Appliance & Mattress, located about 10 minutes north of Salt Lake City, has been a part of the local community in Bountiful, Utah since 1957. It began as a general hardware store called Duerden’s Western Auto, evolving and changing over time with the original family owners, until eight years ago when it was purchased by the current owner Todd Hall. Todd has a background in retail management and saw an opportunity with Duerden’s, partially to own and develop his own business but also to maintain Duerden’s as a thriving part of the community. For Todd, that means making sure he’s able to meet his customers’ needs quickly and efficiently.

The Challenge

Managing customer expectations

One of the store’s biggest challenges has been keeping up with a high volume of customer phone calls, and as part of that, communicating with customers about inventory—out-of-stock items, shortages, shipping delays, and so forth. Handling customer conversations in a timely and productive manner allows the Duerden’s team to stand out from the competition.

“A lot of customers with high-consideration items, I know they’re going to buy from us, but they need to think about it,” says Todd. Some customers spend days, weeks, or even months making a decision about purchasing a refrigerator or a mattress. They don’t want to be pressured; they want to feel like they’re making an informed decision. They will ask friends, read reviews, and compare and contrast models. But when they’re ready to buy, they want to be confident that they’ll get their purchase in a timely manner.

Cumbersome warehouse and delivery communications

Duerden’s has a daily challenge in making sure an order is communicated and passed along from sales to warehouse staff to delivery and installation without letting anything fall through the cracks. Their day-to-day includes handling 9 delivery trucks and over 30 people who work in the warehouse or on delivery crews. They are constantly communicating about delivery statuses, orders, parts, logistics, and scheduling, but they had been relying on group text messaging for communication, and a system of sticky notes to keep track of which team member was in which truck and who to contact with updates. Not only was that a messy process, but most group text messages are limited to 20 people, so one thread was not big enough for the whole team, and new text message threads would have to be created each time someone joined or left the company.

Fragmented payment processes

Duerden’s payments process needs to be able to work seamlessly, and until recently, they had a fragmented experience for the business and customers that cost money and time. “Because the cost was so much different on different platforms, we were using one platform for the credit card machine, another for phone, and still a third for online transactions,” says Jared Hunt, office manager at Duerden’s. “In addition to that, the information was often entered incorrectly, and the rates kept changing. One of the platforms would say, ‘Okay, we’re going to add this fee, or we’re going to do this for you.’” The Duerden’s team realized they needed to find consistency in their payment process to benefit both the customer experience and employee satisfaction.

The Podium Solution

“Customers say ‘Just give me some context. How much is it really going to cost? Do you deliver? Do I need the accessories? How do I complete the sales? Why is that oven better than that one?’ Podium takes care of both our most valuable and our most distracting things,” says Todd. With Podium, daily questions can be answered quickly, over text, rather than taking up valuable time answering phone calls.

Better, faster sales communication

For customers, that means it’s now easier to contact Duerden’s for a quick question—they can get a quick response by starting a text conversation through the Webchat widget on their website, or customers can text directly to their business line. “Our phone used to ring off the hook. We’d have 4-5 calls going at one time. Moving those conversations to text is really helpful,” says one salesperson. Being able to manage customer conversations quickly helps them concentrate their efforts where they’re needed most, helping every team member down the line.

Improved internal communication

Podium also helps internal conversations flow more smoothly, too—with Podium, messages can be sent to a group of any size, cleaning up all the logistical clutter of group texting. Now the Duerden’s team sends messages to groups organized by delivery truck, warehouse, or sales, greatly reducing the amount of time spent communicating internally. In fact, Duerden’s estimates they save a few hours every day with Podium. That’s a huge burden lifted. “If I get a call from a customer and they wonder how long it’s going to be before [the delivery] shows up, I can send a message through Podium to the truck that has that product and let them know that that customer is looking for an ETA. That can happen no matter who’s on which truck,” says Jared Hunt, office manager.

Not only that, the Duerden’s delivery team has also saved hundreds of hours per month by sending installation photos via webchat; before, installers had to upload photos one by one after an appliance installation, which proved tedious– especially on commercial jobs where the process would have to be repeated hundreds of times. But now they can bulk upload photos from their mobile device and send photos to the customer and to their system of record in seconds.

Streamlined payments

When it’s time to pay, Duerden’s Appliance customers can conveniently check out through Podium Payments with text-to-pay or in-store purchases instead of three separate payment vendors. That means the team can not only save time and costs associated with processing, but they can provide better customer service too, by allowing customers to conveniently pay when the time is right. With Podium, each transaction is part of a customer’s profile, so the team can keep things organized and better serve that customer the next time they text, call, or visit the store.

Results and ROI

In the past year, Duerden’s Appliance & Mattress has seen the following results through Podium:

→ 2,000 new leads

“The salespeople say it makes easy communication for people that have questions from our website. It makes a two-way conversation so that the customer can buy the correct product,” says Jared.

→ 3,300 efficient conversations

“If I get a call from a customer and they wonder how long it’s going to be before [the delivery] shows up, I can send a message through Podium to the truck that has that product on, and let them know that that customer is looking for an ETA,” says Jared—”that can happen no matter who’s on which truck.”

→ 90 minute average time to payment

“It saves us a lot of headaches, and hours of time every day,” said Todd. “Customers love it, and literally yesterday, I got a large payment on a project via text-to-pay. It’s super seamless because, whether they’re in the store and they’re touching the card, or whether they’re on the phone, giving you the number or text-to-pay, just various people feel different comfort levels.”

Duerden’s provides a world-class experience with Podium

Focusing on internal efficiencies has led to greater success at Duerden’s Appliance & Mattress. It’s not always work that the customer sees, but it’s work that the customer feels—reduced wait times, easier communication, and overall better service. And for the Duerden’s team, saved time means simplified processes and reduced costs.

Want to see how Podium can make your business more efficient? Start a free trial today.

Key Trends Defining the State and Future of Local Retail

168%

increase in survey response rate

32,204

survey responses in 2021 YTD

1,381%

increase in review response rate

4,092

reviews in 2021 YTD

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CD One Price Cleaners is a well known dry cleaner in Chicago and throughout the Midwest with more than two decades in operation. The business provides a different experience than typical dry cleaners. While other dry cleaners charge different prices depending on the type of garment, CD One Price Cleaners charges the same price for every clothing item—and that price is significantly lower than the industry average. CD One also offers standard same-day service. If a customer drops off by 10 AM, their order will be ready the same day by 5 PM.

In partnering with Podium, CD One Price Cleaners has increased customer feedback response rates from 9.9% to 26.5%, resulting in more than 32,000 feedback responses. And they’ve increased their review response rate from .27% to 4%, resulting in more than 4,000 new reviews. This increase in customer feedback helps CD One Price Cleaners continuously improve their customer experience, retain customers, and drive more new business.

About CD One Price Cleaners

The idea for a better dry cleaning experience began in 1984 when Rafiq Karimi Jr. and his older brother started working in the industry in Houston, Texas. The brothers moved to Chicago in 2001—taking 15 years of knowledge with them—and started an all-new dry cleaning business. They’ve since worked in virtually every aspect of dry cleaning—from site selection to dry cleaning operations and equipment distribution—with a vision of creating a ground-breaking business model. That business model is now a thriving franchise operation with 36 stores throughout the Midwest.

The Challenge

CD One Price Cleaners strives to provide a consistent, personalized experience for customers and a supportive, technologically-sophisticated experience for franchisees. With 36 stores, it’s crucial that they provide an uninterrupted corporate-to-local experience. Unfortunately, prior software solutions and process around customer reviews and feedback were keeping CD One Price Cleaners from their vision in significant ways, including:

Challenge #1: Low response rates and limited SMS functionality in legacy system

CD One Price Cleaners values customer feedback. That’s why they started using the net promoter score company-wide in 2011. The software solution they were using to gather feedback at the time relied primarily on email communications. That solution also failed to provide any kind of dashboard where their team could reply to customers in real-time.

Because their legacy solution relied primarily on email, only 10-13% of customers were responding to their feedback inquiries. They would then send an invitation to leave a review to those same customers who had responded to the feedback inquiry, meaning they were asking only 10-13% of their total customer base to leave reviews. And of course, only a small portion of those customers would actually leave a review. This left CD One Price Cleaners with an unreliable sample size for feedback and a lackluster online reputation.

“The driving catalyst for us to switch feedback solutions was the fact that between 2011 and 2021, there’s been a significant shift in the way consumers interact with brands. Email was a popular option in 2011, and it still is, but now SMS and text have become the primary one-to-one touchpoint for brands to connect with customers. We were doing some text messaging with [our former solution], but the response rate was low and we were only able to send texts to those who didn’t have emails. And there was no dashboard to reply directly to feedback in [our former solution]. And we wanted that full, comprehensive experience. So that’s why we started looking around,” said Jonathon Reckles, Director of Marketing at CD One Price Cleaners.

Challenge #2: Missed opportunities from relying on email for both NPS surveys and online reviews

Over the years, CD One Price Cleaners has been paying close attention to shifting consumer expectations. Though email was popular in 2011 (and still is to a large extent today) they started to notice that SMS messaging was quickly becoming the primary one-to-one touchpoint for their brand to connect with customers. They knew they were missing out on a lot of opportunities with their customers simply because they were relying on the wrong communication channels. That’s why they started searching for a solution to incorporate SMS into NPS surveys and online reviews.

Challenge #3: Lack of visibility at the store and corporate levels

In shifting platforms, the corporate team at CD One Price Cleaners needed to maintain control over how their data was distributed between their corporate offices and their individual franchise stores. They needed flexibility and control over permissions and parameters for employees at the corporate office versus store-level managers, store-level employees, and so on. In short, they needed to answer the following question: who receives what information, and when?

Challenge #4: Customer experience designed for growth

CD One Price Cleaners recently opened its first self-service, locker-based store in Hopkins, MN and also offers Pickup & Delivery in areas of Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Louis, but some of their legacy systems have led to a disjointed experience for customers who use multiple fulfillment methods. CD One has a vision to develop a fully omnichannel experience, which will provide customers with a cohesive brand experience regardless of when or how they choose to do business with CD One. Instead, they want communication across channels to feel seamless and simple for both customers and employees.

The Solution

Podium Reviews

Instead of sending review invites to only a small portion of customers—those who had responded with feedback—CD One Price Cleaners started using Podium to send feedback invitations to half of their customers and review invitations to the other half. By switching from their previous solution to Podium, they have increased their review response rate from .27% to 4%, resulting in nearly 4,000 more reviews than the year prior (YTD as of June 2021), and tracking for 8,000+ more reviews year over year.

To address their omnichannel needs, Podium has enabled CD One to send a review request to a customer based on the specific retail store, locker store, or pickup and delivery area that the customer transacted within.

Podium Surveys

While feedback reachout was previously limited, with Podium, the CD One Price Cleaners team is now able to collect more customer feedback and can more easily close the loop and implement changes. Customers who provide positive feedback now receive an automated thank-you response, asking them to expound on their experience. Any feedback that comes back neutral or negative gets a response asking those customers what the business could do better. From there, conversations are assigned either manually or automatically to the respective location so that they can look into the issue and provide more local support.

Podium Inbox

Using Podium Inbox has come naturally to CD One Price Cleaners. Rather than relying on a third-party solution to respond to reviews—which is what they were doing before switching to Podium—they’re able to respond to reviews directly in Podium. They also use Podium’s leaderboard report feature to rank locations and find areas of opportunity throughout the business where they can provide additional training and support.

“The inbox is easy to use,” Jonathon said. “Being able to respond to reviews directly in Podium, as opposed to a third party, is helpful. And we use the leaderboard report as well so that we can rank locations and find areas of opportunity among the chain where we see a need for additional training.”

With the leaderboard, they can sort by NPS over a given time period. They then use that data to help them compare individual store performance, identify opportunities for improvement, and give out awards to the top three stores each quarter. The Podium dashboard makes it easy to extract specific insights from large feedback samples, providing their training and operational teams with specific areas of focus for each individual location.

Results and ROI

Result #1: 168% increase in feedback survey response rate

One of the top results CD One Price Cleaners has achieved since switching to Podium is a significant increase in feedback responses, leading to more reliable insights into how to improve their customer experience.

“One of the biggest benefits we’ve seen since switching to Podium has been the increase in the number of feedbacks,” said Jonathon. “The insight we get from that feedback helps us improve our customer experience in meaningful ways.”

Result #2: 1,381% increase in review response rate

This impressive increase in reviews has allowed CD One Price Cleaners to not only improve their overall ratings, but also respond quickly and easily to customer reviews. They can now ensure that they’re not missing out on opportunities to say thank you to happy customers and offer empathy and support to unsatisfied customers. Plus, they’ve noticed an increase in organic search traffic by having thousands more reviews.

“The increase in reviews we’ve seen with Podium has been significant,” said Jonathon.“It allows us to one, respond to more people that had an unpleasant experience, and two, react to customers that had a positive experience. And at the end of the day, it helps significantly with SEO to have those Google reviews, which will end up having a dramatic impact on our organic traffic.”

Result #3: Improved, more personalized customer experience

Texting customers has led to a more personalized customer experience. Even when CD One Price Cleaners sends automated text messages, customers feel as though they’re receiving a personalized message from an individual employee.“It’s a much better, more personal experience to receive a text message than it is to receive an email,” Jonathon said. “The text messages are set up in a way to feel more personal, rather than an email blast that they know is going to everyone.” If they decide to respond to that message, the conversation can be routed to the right location so it can move to one-to-one communication. Plus, when customers leave feedback via text, they feel more confident that their feedback will be seen and that something will actually be done.

“The customer feels more empowered,” said Jonathon. “They feel like they’re providing feedback that will actually turn into action. They feel thankful that you’re asking them and feel that they’re in good hands. So, having our customers know that we are there to learn what we can do to improve, hear what we’re doing well, and solve potential issues that may arise, that’s a big benefit for the business.”

Conclusion

So far in 2021, CD One Price Cleaners has used Podium to increase feedback response rates from 9.9% to 26.5%, resulting in more than 32,000 feedback responses—around a 10,000 response increase in just the first 6 months. They’ve increased their review response rate from .27% to 4%, resulting in more than 4,000 new Google reviews. Most importantly, they’ve drastically improved the way they communicate with customers, saving time for the business and customers and providing a more personalized experience.

“By switching to Podium,” Jonathan said, “we’ve been able to significantly increase the number of feedback responses and reviews we receive, which allows us to respond to more customers and give us a larger digital footprint by having those increased reviews on the web.”

Get started with Podium for free today.

140%

increase in reviews with a 4.8 average star rating

305,278

new reviews

148,383

new leads through Website Chat

23.5%

Website Chat conversion rate

This is a fake video section for testing.

Mattress Firm, the nation’s largest mattress retailer, implemented Podium to increase lead generation, improve the online review process, and communicate better with customers both nationally and at the local level. With Podium, Mattress Firm increased reviews by 140%, improving their average star rating to 4.8 stars. At the local level, Mattress Firm saw a 214% increase in reviews per location, boasting over 305,000 new reviews with Podium. Lead generation increased through Podium Website Chat, creating nearly 150,000 leads, converting at over 23%, and generating millions in revenue. With faster review requests, better online communication with customers, and a streamlined internal process—a single inbox for all customer messaging—Mattress Firm saves time, improves the customer experience, and increases revenue with Podium.

About Mattress Firm

Founded on July 4, 1986, Mattress Firm started as a small, mom-and-pop shop in Houston, Texas. Today, they’re nation-wide, coast-to-coast, and boast 2,600 locations. As the nation’s largest mattress retailer, they employ over 6,600 sales employees. They’ve branded themselves the “match-you-with-the-right-mattress-for-you business,” with customer satisfaction at the top of their priorities. Mattress Firm Sleep ExpertsTM begin their careers with over 230 hours of training so they can help each customer pick the right mattress at the right price, every time.

The Challenge

Mattress Firm isn’t just concerned about customers getting a good night’s sleep, they’re invested in a positive customer experience. And for many customers, that experience starts online. Steve Barnes, Senior Manager of Omnichannel Integration at Mattress Firm, and his team are responsible for any digital product or omnichannel customer experience that will be customer-focused or used by a sales associate. Before Podium, collecting reviews, engaging with customers digitally, and even confirming mattress deliveries was challenging.

Challenge #1: Asking for reviews was a clunky, disjointed customer experience

Before Podium, asking customers for a review was more of a grassroots effort in each store. Each location would seek out customers and then ask them to submit a Google review. And while some stores would ask for a Google review, others would ask for a Yelp review.

To add to the chaos, the corporate office at Mattress Firm had their own, somewhat clunky, review collection process done primarily through email. It would populate store locator pages, the website, and add specific product reviews, but more often than not, customers wouldn’t even open the email.

Review collection efforts from each store location and the corporate office created a serious visibility problem. Each store didn’t know how, or even if, corporate was collecting reviews, and the corporate office wasn’t aware of each store location’s efforts. And customers weren’t responding anyway.

“We predominantly used email campaigns. We’d send post-transactional emails. And we were okay at collecting them, but the big struggle was that we weren’t doing anything with the information other than celebrating how many Google reviews we had,” said Steve.

To make matters more complicated, the stores and the corporate office didn’t assign a customer service team to respond to or react to each review. As negative reviews were posted, customers received zero feedback from Mattress Firm.

Challenge #2: Covid-19 brought on an urgent need for digital transformation

The global pandemic accelerated Mattress Firm’s urgent need for a digital customer experience. Nearly two-thirds of the 2,600 locations were temporarily closed. They needed a way to engage customers while employees were working in a store—without the ability to see customers face-to-face—or working from home, servicing customers from a distance. Phone calls and emails weren’t the right fit to help and sell to customers also stuck at home.

“While more than half of our stores were temporarily closed, due to COVID-19, we needed a way for employees that were still active, whether working in a temporarily closed store—without customers coming in—or at home, to be able to service all of our current customers. We also needed a way to still be in contact with potential customers and sell to them through a new channel,” said Steve.

Challenge #3: The delivery confirmation process was manual and often undocumented

When a customer called into their local Mattress Firm store to confirm an appointment or check on an order, there was no record of the conversation. For the furniture and mattress industry, COVID-19 brought on large manufacturing delays, increasing the number of phone conversations with customers—all without a paper trail. Without a record of when or what time a customer’s mattress would be delivered, the store and the customer relied on timelines that would often change, creating a disjointed—and often negative—customer experience.

The Podium Solution

Before the global pandemic, Mattress Firm rolled out a pilot of Podium, solely for reviews. They started with a small market, but quickly expanded to medium-sized markets, and eventually, they introduced Podium to the entire enterprise. Mattress Firm needed a new solution to stay connected to their customers, make it easy to leave a review, and speed up their shift to a fully digital customer journey. And with Podium, they found exactly what they needed.

“We got some really great results from our Podium pilot. We ultimately decided to roll it out to the entire company. And then COVID happened. We had to accelerate our plans and pivot to stay connected to our customers,” said Steve.

Podium Reviews

Before Podium, the corporate office and each store location were misaligned on how to collect customer reviews. Now, with Podium Reviews, it’s a simple, intuitive, and easy process for store associates to request a review and for customers to actually complete the request.

“After we expanded our offering with Podium, the biggest area of opportunity that we solved was just making it easier for our customers to leave a review,” said Steve.

The team now trains their employees on how and when to request a review. They start kicking off the review process as customers sit at a desk during checkout, or as they are leaving the store. And when they receive a negative review? The team is immediately notified and they can reach out to the customer and make it right.

Even customers that come in to speak to the Mattress Firm Sleep ExpertsTM and don’t make a purchase—if it’s been a positive experience the store associate asks them to write a review.

“The review process with Podium is very easy and simple for our customers. I guarantee it’s led to the success we’ve seen in our reviews,” said Steve.

Podium Website Chat

As Mattress Firm prepared to roll out Podium Reviews across the enterprise, the global pandemic presented a new challenge—how could store associates stay connected to customers when two-thirds of their stores were temporarily closed? The answer? Podium Website Chat.

“Business was good, but the global pandemic helped us take all of our priorities and focus on the ones that we needed to dial in on. And in the digital space—COVID eliminated all of the noise and allowed us to really accelerate our progress,” said Steve.

What was planned as a six-to-eight month rollout turned into two and a half weeks. Mattress Firm implemented Podium Reviews and Podium Website Chat—immediately offering a quick and easy way for store associates to connect to customers digitally.

“We needed to shift our focus online and drive more traffic to the website. So for two months straight, we had “hackathons” to figure out what we could do, how we could make it easy for customers to shop and access our sleep experts, get advice, and get serviced,” said Steve.

Mattress Firm needed to drive sales on the site. And with Podium Website Chat, they found what they needed. They added Website Chat to the site with options to call or to text. They routed chats from all of the popular pages on their site, helping people shop and find a store near them.

“And right out of the gate, after we launched Podium Website Chat, with very little training, people were using it immediately. We needed it to work and it worked,” said Steve.

Podium Website Chat also makes routing each message to the right person easy. Mattress Firm’s company hierarchy is vast. They boast five major sales divisions, then multiple regions, market levels, and then eventually, district levels. A district-level could be a bundle of 10 to 20 stores, depending on the location in the United States.

Each chat goes into a district-level inbox, rather than to a skeleton crew at each individual store location. At the district level, there’s always a minimum of 10 team members ready to respond and engage with customers via Website Chat.

“Website Chat has really created an efficiency that we needed. It’s helped ensure our customers will get a more timely response,” said Steve.

Podium Inbox

Reminder messages, sent via Podium Inbox, have also improved the overall customer experience. And it’s all automated. When a delivery is more than 48 hours away, Podium triggers a message flow and sends a series of messages reminding the customer of the delivery date and asking for a confirmation of information. Customers can quickly confirm the appointment and update any information that’s out-of-date. And if the customer has a time conflict, Mattress Firm can quickly reschedule.

“If a customer needs to change a delivery time and they respond back to our automated messages, the workflow then notifies the store with what needs to be changed. We can take action very quickly without having to get on the phone,” said Steve.

Results and ROI

Result #1: A better, more modern customer experience

One of Mattress Firm’s key priorities and core values is putting the customer first. With a digital, omnichannel experience, customers are now the true focus. Now customers can find and read more consistent and relevant reviews in their online search, interact with a local store associate via Website Chat, confirm or adjust delivery dates and times, and leave a quick review, all from their mobile device.

“Podium, more than any other tool or product we’ve launched in the past 10 to 15 years, really helps us put the customer first. It’s allowed us to reach out to our customers, and vice versa, more easily and more smoothly than anything else we’ve ever tried. Just giving our customers the ability to shop from their couch, with a person available via Website Chat, has been huge for our stores,” said Steve.

Result #2: Created a seamless digital-to-physical experience for every customer

Mattress Firm knows that when a customer connects to a local person, it elevates the experience and the sale has a higher rate of converting. Instead of staffing customer responses from the lean, corporate team or having to hire a central team, Mattress Firm now relies on the 6,500 employees ready and eager to communicate with customers. And each message with a customer has a connection to their local store.

“Podium puts the power back into the stores. Instead of relying on a small corporate team, we now have 6,500 people ready to respond to customers. And it’s a better decision from a staffing standpoint and a customer experience standpoint. Our customers can literally chat with someone and then an hour later…see them in person. It’s fantastic,” said Steve.

Connecting customers to local store reps not only scales customer communication, but it also improves the online to offline customer experience—creating a seamless digital-to-physical customer journey. When a customer’s first interaction with Mattress Firm starts online via Website Chat and then transitions to an in-person purchase, sales increase, the average sales order is higher, and most importantly, customer satisfaction scores improve.

“Website Chat also helped customers with a seamless online to in-person transition. When a customer shops in a store, the ticket average is higher, NPS averages are higher, and the customer has a better overall experience, speaking face-to-face with a Sleep Expert,” said Steve.

Result #3: Gathered 305,278 new reviews in 2020 while keeping a 4.8-star rating

The quantity of reviews that Mattress Firm is collecting more than doubles the numbers they were getting (and are still getting!) from their email review request efforts—and they saw those results as quickly as the first three months. This represents a 140% increase in reviews (lifetime with Podium), and a 214% average increase per location for Mattress Firm. And while their review rating was high before Podium, the relevancy and recency of reviews have improved dramatically.

“It shocked me how quickly we were able to double the amount of reviews we had when we launched Podium. It was overnight! It was amazing how fast we were able to increase the quantity of reviews for our company,” said Steve. “We’re still sending review requests via email, but the amount we actually capture pales in comparison to what we get in a single month from Podium.”

Result #4: Improved online reputation as a competitive advantage

The mattress retail space is crowded. But as more and more customers read reviews to help them select the best-of-the-best in not only comfort, but price and overall customer experience, online reputation is critical. And Mattress Firm knows it.

“We know that when we rank higher on Google than our competitors, the competition doesn’t last. It’s been proven time and time again with the small-to-medium-sized retailers that compete with us. Their online reputations never amount to what ours is. And with Podium, we just continue to add to that with more relevant and recent reviews,” said Steve.

Result #5: 148,383 Website Chat leads in 2020 leading to millions in revenue

During the 2020 global pandemic, when retail stores had to close and foot traffic was low across the world, Mattress Firm’s implementation of Website Chat kept leads flowing in. Those leads convert at 23.5% on average, which has resulted in tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Now that stores are open again, the Mattress Firm team also uses Website Chat to connect customers to their local store faster. This creates a better shopping experience for the customer and increases sales for the brand.

“Our main goal with our website is to inform,” said Steve. “People can do research and figure out some things on their own, but ultimately, we want to direct them into our stores because we know the experience is better. Using Website Chat to facilitate this, our ticket averages are higher, our NPS scores are better, and ultimately, we make happier customers from it.”

Result #6: Fewer mattress delivery errors

By automating delivery confirmation texts, Mattress Firm has cut down on delivery errors. Customers are happier and store associates aren’t wasting time on the phone.

“Anyone who delivers anything can attest to all of the user error that comes into entering any customer information. Podium has really helped us automate it and make it really smooth. And we’ve tremendously cut down on delivery errors,” said Steve.

Conclusion

For Mattress Firm, the implementation of Podium was long overdue. Faster review requests, better online communication with customers, reduced delivery errors, and empowerment at the local store level has proved that when the customer is the priority, the experience for everyone gets better.

“Podium has helped us see a different side of Mattress Firm, but more importantly, it’s helped us learn better ways to communicate with customers in the way they want to be communicated with,” said Steve. “My philosophy is, if you bought a bed from Mattress Firm, it doesn’t matter who you talk to, you should be able to get service. I think there are a lot of opportunities to use a platform like Podium to really help streamline a lot of those communications and make it easier for our customers.”

Get started with Podium for free today.

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115

webchat leads per month

$10,000+

saved in credit card fees

This is a fake video section for testing.

Craig Peterson, general manager of Manchester Music Mill, knows what he’s talking about when it comes to rock and roll instruments, and he makes sure his staff does too. For Manchester, this is what sets them apart. “I hire people that are very knowledgeable about musical instruments, that are in it for the passion. I don’t want customers to feel pressured. I want them to feel like they’re buying the right thing for them, and I need knowledgeable salespeople to help them.” That focus along with their non-commission sales model gives Manchester Music Mill the expertise their customers are looking for, along with an increased level of trust.

Founded in 2005 by Joe and Dawn Lacerda, Manchester Music Mill started small, selling music equipment out of one of several practice rooms where bands would come to jam. “We started as musicians servicing musicians in band practice rooms,” Craig says. Since that start in 2005, Joe and Dawn have grown the Music Mill from a 2-person, single room operation to one of the top 200 music retailers in the U.S. and a top seller and partner on Reverb. Joe still owns and operates the business today, which employs over 30 people and owns two buildings, including a full-service tech shop. Manchester Music Mill does it all, from selling brass and woodwind instruments to guitars and amplifiers, as well as offering onsite tech services. They have a pro audio showroom and recording rooms, as well as lesson rooms for music education. “We have something for everybody,” says Craig. “We get customers that are in for the first time, wanting to start and learn how to play, all the way up to the collector that wants the super limited guitar.”

The Challenge

As a forward-thinking business, Joe and his team have made steps throughout their 16-year-history to stay current in customer service and communication. They started with a landline, and have added email, website, and social media through the years. Recently they also served customers through texting on their personal cell phones, which was convenient for customers but less than ideal for the staff.

When the pandemic hit, they got a dedicated cell phone just for texting their customers and advertised that line of communication. “Our customers want to talk by text—they want to message. They don’t want to pick up the phone and listen to a voicemail prompt to dial 2 to get the right person,” says Craig.

And it worked—sort of. “It became very disjointed because we had information coming from all these different sources. If we needed to reference something in a conversation… it was very difficult.” They got lots of texts from customers, but still missed messages occasionally, which led to the need for a new solution.

The Solution

With Podium, Joe and Craig found the answer—now they can still offer texting as a communication channel with their customers, while keeping everything centralized and organized. “It’s more responsive; there’s always somebody responding to it, so their texts or their messages aren’t getting lost,” says Craig. “These tools have opened up an avenue where [customers] can talk easily with Manchester Music Mill, and talk in their voice, and can get a deal done on their cell phone. It’s definitely created a more positive customer experience.”

Since putting a Webchat program on their website, texting is one of their main revenue streams. They now average over 115 inbound Webchat leads monthly, and those customers can go from inquiry to full purchase and payment in one conversation.

Now that they have texting sorted, the process for their customers is smoother all around. Instead of driving long distances to pick up something they saw online only for it to be sold before they get there, customers can text Manchester Music Mill, place a hold on an item, pay for it via text if they’d like, and pick it up at their convenience. “It’s easy for the customers and it’s easy for us,” says Craig.

Fulfilling orders is easier now too because they can pass the conversation through to the next staff member with no friction for the customer. The salesperson can transfer the text conversation from the person inspecting the instrument to the person shipping the instrument, who can text them a tracking number, and it’s all in one message thread and from one phone number. Each employee can communicate with the customer as needed about each step in the process. “There is less running around to make sure that everything goes smoothly,” says Craig. “We can manage the whole workflow through multiple people super efficiently. I would absolutely encourage [music stores] to get on board with Podium. It’ll help them talk to their customers in a more efficient way, it will help increase their business, and it’ll help them be organized.”

Not only were they able to easily answer each message without things slipping through the cracks, but they were also able to solve other problems as well. Previously, they dealt with expensive credit card processing fees and an outdated checkout process. With Podium, they were able to completely replace their old point-of-sale solution and modernize. They now use handheld readers, mobile card readers, and text-to-pay in their store, at events, and at trade shows, so the customer can check out right where they’re at. Payments are processed faster than with their previous processing service, and at a lower rate too—by a conservative estimate Craig says they’ve saved over $10,000 in processing fees alone since they began using Podium Payments eight months ago. That’s a significant impact. For Craig, “[that’s] another part-time person that I can put on staff.”

For Manchester Music Mill’s customers, those convenient ways to talk and pay make it easy to do business with them, and that’s shown in the online reviews Music Mill receives. With texted review invites, they now receive double the online reviews each month and have seen their online ranking and average star rating increase. For Craig, that’s just a consequence of doing business right. “Ultimately, if your customers engage with you and you’re doing a good job and you’re helpful to them and you’re offering them the service that they want, the revenue follows. Podium makes all that stuff super easy.”

Key Results:

Google star rating increased from 4.76 to 4.86
Reviews per month increased from 4.6 to 8.3
Averaging 115+ webchat leads per month
$1.5M in payments collected in 8 months from in-store readers and text to pay
$10,000+ saved in credit card processing fees in the first 8 months with Podium

Array

2.5x

more reviews per month

$34,000

collected remotely via text

This is a fake video section for testing.

Learning to ride a bike is a joyful milestone in a child’s life, and an equally meaningful one for a parent teaching their child to ride. For Sam White, general manager of Liberty Bicycles in Asheville, North Carolina, sharing the joy of cycling has been a part of his life for decades. Their business has been around since 1980, and Sam has been with Liberty since 1989. Cycling is truly his passion—he can’t see himself doing anything else.

Liberty offers a lot to the cycling community. “We sell to everyone—everything from family [bikes] to premium, elite-level products that customers drive in from significant distances to buy from us,” says Sam. And their years of expertise and customer service have made them a real destination, a place that manufacturers along the East Coast refer people to for full fitting services, suspension rebuilds, and their excellent service department.

The Challenge

Managing a business like Liberty Bicycles also means providing customers with convenience in how they communicate. For Liberty, that meant examining their current workflow and finding ways to improve—and save themselves from the headaches of dealing with the phones. “One of the big problems we were trying to solve is that last summer before we went to Podium, the phone rang incessantly. Last July, our phone system broke, and we were down a day without phones. Customers couldn’t get in touch with us other than email, or if they had our cell phone numbers they could text us.” But, obviously, giving out a personal cell phone number isn’t ideal. Their system wasn’t fitting their needs or their customers’ needs.

“It started with [asking] ‘can we take some of these phone calls that are coming in and filter them through a tool that gives us the ability to answer questions quicker on the fly?’ Something where somebody can go, ‘Hey you do have this part in stock?’ We can look it up real quick and answer in four or five words, rather than when you get on the phone it ends up being, you know, sometimes a 10 minute conversation,” says Sam.

This problem (as well as the challenges brought on by the pandemic) exposed an opportunity for Liberty, and they jumped at the chance to upgrade. Now, they offer texting as a communication method and it frees them up to get off the phones and focus on other important work.

The Solution

Being able to communicate conveniently has made all the difference. “That’s how we originally got started [with Podium],” said Sam, “as a tool to free up more time for an already intensely busy sales staff. We still needed to answer those questions in a timely manner, but also not feeling like you got that pressure that you got to answer that phone by the fourth ring.”

For Sam and his store, the convenience also brought a level of credibility that they weren’t expecting. As an independent bike shop, having texting tools available gives them the ability to provide a modern and sophisticated customer communication method. And it came at a good time, especially now with supply chain issues that can cause concern for customers. “We’re in a different time of retail than we’ve ever been in. With limited availability, customers just want to know that they’ve got something claimed.” Texting with Podium lets Liberty take orders remotely, easing customers’ minds.

Liberty found success with Webchat as well, allowing customers and website visitors to start a text conversation with the store right from their home page—and it immediately turned into a popular option. In just 8 months, Liberty Bicycles has already texted with over 900 customers through Webchat. And that wasn’t the only place Liberty was able to find opportunities, either—their payment processes also had room for upgrade.

Previously, customers would have to get on the phone and read sensitive credit card details out loud, which is a frustrating experience at best, and risky at worst. “Customers were calling from all over the Southeast. We were selling bikes to people four and five hours away because we had the bike in stock and others didn’t. Our only way to claim payment at that point was for them to call us and give us their credit card number over the phone to put a deposit down on the bike and hold it.” But texting gave them a completely new channel for taking deposits—and one that grew quickly. Liberty Bicycles received over $20,000 in reservation deposits via text message in their first 6 weeks with Podium. Customers were thrilled to know they could reserve the bike they wanted, even before visiting the store.

“Initially [texting] was more so we could get the information to the customer quicker, but then we realized real quickly, you know, let’s ask for a deposit. And it worked well. It worked really, really well.” With Podium, they were able to change their remote payment process to be more secure, less tedious, and more convenient for their customers. Now, they can send a payment request over text and can get paid in seconds. “We’re not sitting here having to worry about somebody calling out a credit card number over the phone jotting it down on a piece of paper—it’s safer, you know. It’s a more secure way of doing that, and we also get charged a lower fee with Podium than if we do a keyed-in transaction.”

These systemic improvements have made a real difference in Liberty’s day-to-day. Now they can see each customer’s history at a glance, so they can serve them better. “Going back and seeing the history of the texting chain has been great. Customers don’t want to repeat themselves and start a whole conversation over again to a new salesperson you didn’t talk to last time.” And that benefits both sides of the conversation. “In this instance you can have your cake and eat it too… [Texting] is a great thing for the consumer but it also makes our lives easier.”

This focus on improving communication has led to other benefits, as well. Liberty Bicycle’s reviews are climbing as a result of improved customer experience. Their store is now collecting more than a dozen reviews per month, which is 2.5x better than before, improving to a 4.9 star rating on Google.

“The biggest thing about the store is the longevity and the customer service we’ve offered… I think Podium is helping us offer another layer that we haven’t offered before, always looking at new ways to give us new ways to contact customers and make it easier for them.”

And all of this starts from a desire to serve their community and a passion for cycling. Sam related a story of a family who came in recently to buy a bike for their 6-year-old. They had been trying to teach the child to ride a bike for months. Sam went out to the parking lot with the family and together they had the child riding in less than 5 minutes. Sam says, “We just want to get more people riding bicycles. We want people to enjoy that wind in their hair that we all remember when we were kids.”

Key Results:

900 inbound leads via webchat
$20K paid via text in the first 6 weeks, $34K total
126 new reviews
Reviews per month increased from 4.8 to 12.6
4.9 star rating on Google
106% increase in web traffic

Array

62%

increase in reviews

2,297

webchat leads

$5M

collected in 4 months

working hours saved per month

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Array

Bedzzz Express, a specialty mattress retailer in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee, has been serving customers since 1995. In over 25 years, they’ve grown to more than 50 stores and boast top brands like Beautyrest, Sealy, Tempur-Pedic, Resident, and Cahaba Bedding. With a history of customer-first experiences, Bedzzz Express is focused on offering the best mattresses at the best prices.

Austin Bond, President of Sleep Tight Inc., a franchise of Bedzzz Express, runs 29 Bedzzz Express stores in the Southeast United States. Before Podium, they experienced several friction points in the customer journey.

The Challenge

No strong digital communication channels: Before Podium, Sleep Tight Inc. didn’t offer any form of web chat on their website. With no way for a customer to chat or ask questions, they resulted to phone calls or emails, which most customers avoided altogether. “I can count on one hand how many emails we had come in, so it wasn’t really working,” said Austin.

It was difficult to keep up with industry changes: “We were trying to stay on top of changes in the industry with blogs and other ways to connect to customers,” said Austin. But with so many changes in search and online research, the team struggled to keep up with new marketing strategies.

Gathering reviews was a manual process and inconsistent across each store: The process to collect reviews was limited and outdated—a QR code taped to the desk asked passing customers to post their reviews online. “It was basically a postcard taped to the desk. We would ask customers to point their phone at the QR code and go to the website to post their review,” said Austin. The team would also send emails that included the website link after each purchase and send a physical postcard home with each customer, but the results varied from store to store.

Too much time was wasted on the phone: Sales representatives relied on phone calls to try and reconnect with interested customers. “We used to try to get people to call back, but they don’t answer or check voicemails anymore, so we never heard back,” said Austin. Delivery calls also went right to voicemail. Delivery confirmation phone calls would often come from a random phone number and customers would decline the call. If the delivery wasn’t confirmed, sales staff or the store manager had to follow up with customers manually.

The Podium Solution

In 2018, the Bedzzz Express team didn’t just find their customer communication solution with Podium, they found a platform that streamlined the entire customer journey.

Connecting online shoppers with local experts: When customers start a conversation with Bedzzz Express online, they type in their zip code and, based on their location, they’re connected via text message with the closest store, instead of routed to a central call center. Austin described the experience with Podium Webchat, “The person they’re connected [is] the person at the actual store location that’s closest to them. When they go into the store, the store manager can actually say, “Hi, I was the one texting with you earlier.” It’s really powerful.”

Boosting online reviews with a better review request: “We chose Podium Reviews because of ease. And there was a noticeable bump in reviews when we started the automation,” said Austin. The automated reviews process with Podium is saving every sales representative valuable time to focus on solving more customer problems and selling more product. And on the training side, by selecting an automated tool with Podium, getting new hires ready to sell is faster and easier.

Creating a faster, more convenient checkout experience: With text-to-pay, Podium is “minimizing the risk of customers not completing the transaction,” said Austin. Now, sales staff can send a payment link directly to customers on their mobile device in the same thread where they’ve already been talking about a specific product, collected the customer’s address, and talked about a delivery date. In-store card readers are also adding convenience to the customer experience at Bedzzz Express. “The card readers are really fast. When you put a chip in, it’s nearly instant. I’ve never seen a card reader transact as fast as a Podium card reader,” said Austin.

Saving each store time and connecting better with customers: Now that each store is communicating with customers via text, customer communication is faster, easier, and saving everyone time. “The ease of communication with new and existing customers is the biggest benefit of Podium,” said Austin. “We use Podium for so much communication now. It’s as simple as a text and everybody looks at it. Everyone sees it.”

Results and ROI

→ 62% increase in reviews with an average rating of 4.93 stars

Out of more than 3,000 total reviews for Bedzzz Express, nearly 2,000 are attributed to a Podium invite with an average rating of 4.93. Before Podium, the average rating sat at 4.67, but with an automated ask for every customer, a more convenient way to post a review, and a better overall customer experience, the average review rating has jumped to 4.86 overall. On average, the team is gathering 2x more monthly reviews at each location—from an average of 1.75 reviews per month to 3.5 reviews.

→ 12% conversion rate on 2,297 Webchat leads

Averaging 112 leads per month over the last two years, the Bedzzz Express sales staff has seen incredible results with Webchat. They’ve collected more than 2,000 inbound leads, converting at 12%. “I would argue it’s a 100% increase in web leads because we didn’t have a web chat before Podium,” said Austin. The new channel is working so well, it’s adding as much as a single store’s volume each month.

→ Saved a minimum of 80 hours on the phone per month

With Podium, the sales staff is saving valuable time every month. Per sales representative, the time savings is at least two hours per month. With 40 salespeople, the savings is well over 80 hours per month. Now, the team can spend more time with customers in person and on a channel that converts—texting.

→ 90% payment completion rate with more than $5 million collected in 4 months

The collection rate with Podium Payments is 90% with more than $5 million collected in the last four months. Plus, the average payment time is down to less than 18 minutes—significantly shorter than before Bedzzz Express offered text-to-pay and customers had to pay in person.

→ Doubled the conversion rate of customers who leave the store without purchasing

With a direct link to customers via text, the team at Bedzzz Express is seeing another benefit of Podium—a higher conversion of customers that leave the store without purchasing. “Our conversion rate for the people that leave and then come back has least doubled,” said Austin.

→ Improved customer experience and retention

With a pre-store experience online, Podium Webchat offers a better way to connect with a local sales representative. The in-store experience is elevated with follow up text messages and easy payment options. And the post-purchase experience is more convenient with an automated and convenient review ask.“There’s no other service that we could pay for that could help in all of those areas,” said Austin.

“Life before Podium was a lot more cumbersome, slower, more difficult,” said Austin. Now, after implementing Podium across the entire customer journey—from discovery, with Podium’s online chat tool for website, to consideration, with Messaging and Payments, to post-purchase with Reviews—the customer experience is customer-focused. Bedzzz Express is communicating with customers in preferred channels, offering faster checkout options, and collecting reviews for a more accurate online reputation.

Podium can help your business too. Start a free trial today.

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1,328

reviews collected

4.2 to 4.9

change in star rating

1,687

Webchat leads generated

$4.2M

processed via Podium Payments

This is a fake video section for testing.

Very few jewelers can say they’ve gone from selling jewelry from a horse and buggy to doing it all online and over text. Lux Bond & Green, a family-owned jeweler with five locations in Connecticut and Massachusetts, is one of them. In 1898, Morris A. Green started operating his fine jewelry business out of a horse-drawn cart, repairing and selling gold and silver jewelry including pocket watches and gold eye frames on the streets of downtown Waterbury, Connecticut. More than a century later, Lux Bond & Green is one of the longest continuously operating jewelers in the United States.

“Being family-owned is pretty important to us,” Andrea Mascaro, Marketing & Advertising Director at Lux Bond & Green, told us. “But I’m not so sure it’s important to our customers anymore. What seems to be important to them is the level of service they receive and the level of attention they get.”

Lux Bond & Green is a business with a rich history. While they’re still rooted in their tradition and core values, they haven’t let that keep them from adapting to the rapidly changing technology environment—especially during a global pandemic. When COVID-19 hit the U.S., it not only accelerated their need to adapt, but also changed their perspective of how they view their business.“The movement with COVID and everybody starting to shop online more has changed our perspective,” Andrea told us.“It’s made us realize that we’re really a technology company in the jewelry industry.” When people started to go into quarantine in the spring of 2020, Lux Bond & Green was left with five physical locations and zero foot traffic. That was a major problem. But Andrea and her team quickly began to see it more as an opportunity to embrace change.

“The luxury market expects top priority customer service,” Andrea told us. “It was demanded of us that we needed to figure out how to make our customers happier.”

What specific problems were you facing as a business?

Lack of online reviews.

“Everything was starting to move online and we needed a better online presence. We work with a digital media company, and one of their suggestions was that we needed to step up our Google reviews to drive more traffic to our website, getting out there and spreading the word through the internet.”

Losing website traffic and sales.

“In the beginning, our website was just a channel for people to look and connect, not necessarily shop. It has become more apparent as the years go on and lifestyles change that the website is another store. It’s another experience altogether. Our goal was to make our website feel like you’re entering into one of our stores.”

Insufficient response times.

“Our customers were looking for ease of use. They were looking for quick responses. They wanted things done quickly. We work with certain luxury brands that require a certain level of experience and service. They require us to respond on all of our channels, including social media, in under seven minutes.

Difficulty managing communications for multiple locations.

“People were already communicating through their cell phones, including all of our sales associates to their customers. And so it became something that could get out of control quickly if there wasn’t any way to monitor it or guide it.”

Difficulty navigating digital transformation.

“We’ve tried to take this omnichannel branding approach of luxury service. The in-store experience is very white glove. It was a challenge for us to take that and move it to our other platforms, like texting, the website, and our social media.”

Outdated payment process.

“During COVID, people didn’t want to exchange their credit card with someone, even in the store. And regardless of COVID, nobody likes having to put in their credit card information online or over the phone, especially now that we’ve all grown accustomed to things like Apple Pay and other one-touch methods. We quickly realized that we needed a faster, more secure way to collect payments from customers.”

How have you used Podium to solve those problems?

Collecting more than 1,000 reviews via text.

“It’s been wonderful. We have hundreds if not thousands of five-star reviews now. And it’s been a great tool in terms of feedback to know either where we’re missing the mark, if we are, or how great we’re doing and what customers like the most.”

Improving website experience and collecting 1,687 Webchat leads.

“With Podium Webchat, if a customer selects a store, the message then goes to the location manager or whoever they deem responsible. And they then assign the conversation to someone who’s our watch specialist, or someone who’s a good diamond buyer, or something to that effect.”

“If we didn’t have [Webchat], and a customer had a question about something, I’m sure they would go somewhere else. If we lose that touchpoint, then we’re probably going to lose that customer. We certainly have found that we’re getting more conversions because it’s easier to guide people online when they have questions, as opposed to just letting them click off the website.”

Improving response times and overall communications.

“Responding to our customers before we had texting? It was really difficult. It was a phone call. And so when you’ve got people on the phone and on the [sales] floor and they’re working and now they have to come off the floor and make a phone call, whereas podium allows us to have their cell phone and their computer stations around our stores where they can log on and respond, or they can go on their texts and go, “Oh, you know, so-and-so customer just texted me. He’s looking for a baby gift. Let me go find something that might work and send him a picture. So it’s been very helpful in completing that white-glove branding experience throughout all of our platforms. We respond to all text messages, all social media, all emails from customers within 10 minutes”

Managing communications for multiple locations.

“Podium has become such an integral part of our business at this point in time because we’re able to watch our teams communicate with their customers and we’re able to see how quickly they’re responding. It gives us something to motivate them as well. We send out a weekly report that we get from Podium via email and say, ‘Hey, great job responding to these inquiries and text messages.”

Streamlining the payment process and experience, collecting $4.2M.

“One of the ways for us to succeed in business is to keep ahead of the times. And so for us to explore Podium Payments was just kind of the next step. Our customers were looking for ease of use. They were looking for quick responses. They wanted things done quickly. And I think it was just easier for us to process payments using Podium as opposed to coming into the store and swiping their card or going online and entering it in. it was just the quicker of the two.

Everyone has their phones—they’re such an important tool for all of us. It made our customers’ lives easier, it made us easier to work with, and it helped expedite the process for us. You have everything programmed into your phone. It’s easy. Click. Send. I’m done. So I think it becomes more of a convenient tool for us. It’s allowed us to increase our customer service and give our customers more possibilities with the way that they want to shop.”

3,258

opted-in subscribers collected in under 3 months

8,000

campaign messages with an average click rate of 5%

30 minutes

to receive their first SMS Campaign generated revenue

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Woodstock Furniture & Mattress Outlet started in 1988 by acquiring and selling returns, overstocks, and scratch and dent items from well-known catalog merchants, like Sears and Service Merchandise. Eventually, they gained a reputation as the place around town to find great deals on furniture and mattresses, and they became a fixture in the local community. Now, they’re a “Hometown Furniture Superstore,” focused on selling high-quality furniture and providing a top-notch customer experience. They now have 8 locations throughout Georgia.

We spoke with Jared Taylor—the Digital Marketing Manager at Woodstock Furniture—about his experience there. Throughout his six years with Woodstock Furniture, he’s been able to watch the company evolve, and with that, he’s seen the company continually adopt new Podium products, too. After experiencing the positive effects of Podium firsthand, Jared has become a true champion of Podium: “I have definitely championed and referred several people that we have come in contact with through buying groups.”

Woodstock Furniture & Mattress Outlet has been using Podium since 2017 when Reviews was the only product available. Since then, Woodstock and Podium have grown in sync. As Podium expanded, Woodstock found that it could incorporate each new Podium product into its business.

Discovering Podium

Woodstock Furniture didn’t always use Podium though. Jared could recall the first time he learned about Podium. He explained, “[I] saw Podium at Market (a tradeshow) and got a chance to meet the team at the Podium Booth. [I] learned how easy it was to send out review invites, which is something that we were having difficulty with on our previous platform. Our previous platform was great at displaying reviews, but not actually getting the request. [Podium] just made it super simple.” Jared understood that customers were already on their phones and checking out reviews online, so sending review invites via text was revolutionary for Woodstock Furniture. After years of relying on local word of mouth, Podium Reviews helped elevate their already stellar reputation—this time online.

Although Reviews was the only product at the time, their experience with Podium didn’t stop there. “Typically we’ve jumped on [new Podium products] as soon as they’ve become available,” Jared told us. “We started off with basically sales users for the review invites, then we gradually moved into Webchat for the web team, which has grown significantly in the last year,” he explained.

They grew the business in the 1990’s based on local reputation for great service and great value, but now in the age of on-demand everything, Jared didn’t hesitate to take the business online.

Incorporating Podium Payments

After establishing a positive online reputation and gaining new leads through Webchat and text, Jared started to explore the ways that Podium could help other parts of the company. One of those ways was Payments. “We started using it (Payments) because our former website didn’t have a working checkout cart. So we had to get people to send us an order email and we would respond with a payment link. Then with COVID we started using it [Payments] more because we had a skeleton crew and we had deliveries that needed to be made, so we started sending payment links to people and it was just so easy to use that everybody who wasn’t using it before just started saying “well, this is the way to go,” Jared explained. Since Woodstock Furniture was already requesting reviews via text, sending payment links via text was a logical next step. Podium made collecting payments an integrated part of the customer journey, and it played an integral role in helping Woodstock Furniture succeed during COVID.

Jared explained, “It’s definitely given us an edge in customer experience and modernization, where now customers just feel like they can text us and then easily pay through text,” and ultimately he shared, “When we send customers a link it’s very simple to use. It’s saved us time as a company and saved us money.” Not only did collecting payments become significantly easier, but providing a modern, high-quality experience became easier for the team, too.

The latest Podium adoption: SMS Marketing

More recently, Jared adopted one of the newest Podium products for Woodstock Furniture: Campaigns. Jared saw instant value in Campaigns—instant as in, less than 30 minutes from send to sale. “The biggest thing was when we were at Market (a tradeshow) with the Podium booth and we sent a mattress campaign. We had a person text back with a response almost immediately that they were interested and wanting to know where they could purchase. So that was huge for seeing the effectiveness and how quickly it could turn around and reach people. That was a huge thing. Kind of like when we turned on webchat for the first time,” Jared recalled. The response time was almost immediate for their first mattress campaign, and he explained that it had the same effect that turning on Webchat for the first time did—it was game-changing.

Jared went on to tell us that since the success with their first campaign, they’ve tried to incorporate more campaigns into their regular marketing tactics. Since adopting Campaigns, they’ve collected 3,258 subscribers in under 3 months, most of which have been captured via Webchat. Jared also shared that most of their locations have an average campaign click rate of 5% or higher—some even as high as 8%.

Using Podium in all parts of the business

Jared explained that, “Now customer service is actually using [Podium Payments] to take payments for service and parts. Before, they were having to call cashiers at the store and have them ring things up to collect payment. So it’s grown—almost every department uses Podium to some capacity now,” Jared told us. The ease of use lets every team in the company focus more on the customer experience, and less on the burdens that came with using archaic systems.

The platform to power a Hometown Superstore

When asked about the main benefits of using Podium, Jared explained that it was, “Ease of communication with the customer. In today’s world we know that everyone has their phone on them at all times. We know that if you send them a text that they are going to respond and they are going to see it more often than not.”

Although Woodstock Furniture already had a solid reputation among locals, incorporating Podium into their overall business helped the company establish itself online as it expanded to more storefronts, and it helped the business rebrand from an outlet to a local hometown superstore. Jared worked diligently to continue adopting new Podium products as they were released, which allowed the business to adapt as consumers, the world, and technology changed. Doing so made business easy, and ultimately resulted in happy customers and booming business—some of the greatest measures of success for a company. “Being able to communicate with customers or potential customers through their phone is a huge deal, and makes it easy for us to do business.”

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4.2 - 4.8

change in average star rating

5,000+

inbound Webchat leads in 9 months

1,547

SMS subscriber opt-ins in 2 months

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“We have to be thinking about consumers of the future,” Madeline Sweeten of LA Furniture told us in our recent interview. “They are the young people who grew up with cell phones and computers… they are very efficient with their time, and we need to be aware of that.”

LA Furniture is a family-run furniture retailer based in Los Angeles, California. With two retail locations and two warehouses, they ship their products nationwide.

“I think our biggest triumph is that we’re offering these high-end items at costs that are more affordable for just anybody, Madeline told us. “You’re not going to pay $1,200 for a dining chair, if you don’t want to. You can, but we offer options, and I think that’s what makes us so special.”

Madeline is responsible for merchandise marketing at LA Furniture, which entails maintaining product lines, ensuring everything is accurately depicted on the website, and overseeing their small Marketing team.

Madeline and her team had historically relied on email to communicate with customers, but that was resulting in low response rates and some customer dissatisfaction.

“Far too often our emails would go to a spam folder.”

“Far too often our emails would go to a spam folder and customers would never read the email,” Madeline told us. “And they wouldn’t know that they needed to agree to the delivery terms or wouldn’t get the memo that their item was out of stock. This led to a lot of customer dissatisfaction.”

Some of those customers would then leave reviews reflecting that dissatisfaction. And because LA Furniture had only a handful of reviews at the time, the negative ones carried more weight. Their average star rating wasn’t bad, but Madeline knew they’d need a lot more reviews if they wanted their ratings to reflect reality.

Transforming LA Furniture’s online reputation.

At the time, Madeline and her team were relying on email to send review invitations to customers, so most of them were going to spam or getting lost in customers’ inboxes. They started searching for a better way to collect and respond to reviews. They shopped around and ultimately decided to go with Podium.

“We went from a 4.2 average star rating to now we’re at a 4.8,” Madeline told us. “And that’s really because we’re able to so easily send review requests through Podium.”

Madeline had transformed LA Furniture’s online reputation, but she still needed to find a better way to handle general customer communications.

Connecting instantly with online shoppers.

Since texting was working so well for collecting reviews from customers, she figured it was worth trying for other customer interactions. That’s when she realized that Podium had solutions for virtually every part of the customer journey. Her team started using Podium’s Inbox and Webchat to bring in more leads and connect with them almost instantly through text. In the first nine months, they generated more than 5,000 new leads through Webchat.

“With Podium, our average response time is less than a minute. That’s crazy time savings.”

“I think about how long it takes to make a phone call,” Madeline told us. “You’re not going to get out of a phone call with a customer in under five, six minutes, at best. With Podium, our response time is less than a minute. That’s five times less, if not more. That’s crazy time savings.”

Since Madeline’s team was using text messaging to gather more reviews, connect instantly with online shoppers, and communicate with customers, she immediately thought of Podium to solve her next challenge: she had realized that LA Furniture could do a better job of marketing to and re-engaging past customers, or those who had abandoned their carts.

“Prior to Podium we used a mix of social media and website,” Madeline told us. “And we were finding that past customers weren’t being reached by this approach.”

Re-engaging past customers with SMS marketing.

When Madeline heard about the launch of Podium Campaigns, she thought it looked like a promising alternative—or even addition to—social media and email marketing. The first promotion she ran with Campaigns was a two-day flash sale offering customers a 10% discount on items in one of their warehouses that had been overstocked with one of their bestselling sofas. Thanks to Podium Campaigns, her opt-in list was already built—and growing. In just under two months, LA Furtniture’s opt-in list included 1,547 potential buyers, making an SMS promotion a no-brainer.

“So we created a PDF of the discount pricing, created a link on our website, and used that link to attach to our Podium campaign,” Madeline told us. “And we sent it to all of our subscribers.”

LA Furniture SMS Campaign:
We are now offering an EXTRA 10% on some of our best sellers! Add this extra 10% to our existing sales for a limited time! Click Below: https://www.lafurniturestore.com/sale/now.jpg

That two-day flash sale promotion ended up being more effective than LA Furniture’s past efforts in email and social media marketing. The SMS promotion had an 8.4% click rate, significantly higher than the average email click rate of 2.6%.They also got responses much faster, and that helped them make room in their overstocked warehouse for new inventory. Plus, they saved their team a significant amount of time and resources.

“If we were in a similar situation with too much inventory in the past, we would send that out to our email list,” Madeline told us. “And we would probably put something up on social media saying, ‘We have these items if you’d like to purchase them.’ And we wouldn’t have any real way of measuring how many people that reached, how many people engaged with it, and how many people made purchases from it. That would have taken four hours, maybe five. And with Podium, we’re able to very quickly send that message out, know who it went to, know who responded to it, who engaged with it and know if it led to sale. And building it took 15 minutes.”

Now, LA Furniture gives customers the chance to opt in to SMS promotions when they leave a review or reach out via Webchat on their website. Madeline and her team are continuing to build their SMS subscriber list and are looking forward to using Campaigns in the upcoming summer sales season.

“We couldn’t do what we do without Podium.”

“Before Podium, we were bogged down with the inability to communicate with our customers efficiently and effectively,” Madeline told us. “Now that we’re using Podium, we’re able to effectively communicate with our customers in a way that’s personal and saves the company and our customer time. We couldn’t do what we do without Podium.”

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Retail’s Overnight Digital Transformation

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At 2:00 AM, while most of us have sugar plums dancing in our heads, Elisabeth Johnson’s kitchen swells with the sweet scent of pastries. Chocolate fudge cookies watch from the counter as the entrepreneur flits about, glazing fig pecan scones and pulling peach pies from the oven.

A few years ago, Elisabeth was just a cog in the machine of a baked-goods franchise.

“I felt so stifled there,” Elisabeth said. “I was promised the world and then wasn’t given a lot of opportunities—I was barely baking. It was mostly just shaping bread.”

Coincidentally, one of her fellow employees shared Elisabeth’s passion for baking and suggested a radical idea. Why didn’t Elisabeth take advantage of Minnesota’s cottage laws and open a home pastry shop?

Elisabeth latched onto the idea. She quit her job and started preparing for her first day at the farmer’s market. She could just imagine herself bringing mountains of pastries to the market and selling out in record time.

Except she didn’t.

During her first week, Elisabeth brought home more than half of what she set out to sell.

“At the beginning, it was hit and miss,” Elisabeth said. “I didn’t have a strong customer base. I had successes here and there, but it wasn’t until months later when I started recognizing familiar faces and building a more consistent clientele.”

As Elisabeth’s business began slowly rising, she received a message from her brother at Podium. He told Elisabeth the company was working on Podium Starter, a free version of the software for small businesses. Elisabeth concealed her skepticism.

“I wanted to be supportive, but I didn’t actually think that it was right for my business,” Elisabeth said. “I just wanted to be a nice sister, so I said ‘yeah, lets try it out and see what happens.’”

Little did she know, Podium Starter was about to simplify customer interactions and establish her online reviews.

“One of the reasons I didn’t think it was going to work for me was because farmer’s market patrons are typically older and I don’t have their numbers,” Elisabeth said. “But when I was setting up Podium Starter, I learned that I can also use email. That was exciting because I already have a huge database of emails and people I can contact that way.”

Elisabeth sends out weekly menus to clients to gage interest and collect pre-orders. With Podium Starter, she can leverage that platform to easily message clients and collect payments through a simple, secure link.

Elisabeth is also using Podium to kickstart her reviews.

“I just sent out a few review requests to some of my regulars and had an overwhelmingly positive response,” Elisabeth said. “I went from having zero Google reviews to several five-star reviews just because it never occurred to me to ask. Podium was the door that busted open my reviews.”

At Podium, we’re proud to support entrepreneurs like Elisabeth who make their dreams a reality. It takes hope and courage to make something great, and we’re dedicated to helping you succeed. That’s why we’ve introduced Podium Starter.

With Podium Starter, you can message customers, get reviews, and text payment requests for free. Learn more about how Podium Starter can boost your business here.

10X

Increase in monthly reviews

266

Webchat leads per month

14%

Webchat lead conversion

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For specialists in a good night’s sleep, the managers of Makin’ Mattresses were losing a lot of it. Instead of counting sheep, they had been counting their positive and negative online reviews, and things didn’t add up.

“We had a really poor online perception of our business,” said Kate Simpson, Marketing Manager of Makin’ Mattresses. “ But in customer surveys, people would rave about us. They’d rave about our product, they’d rave about our service, and we were left scratching our heads.”

One of Kate’s friends, who was also in advertising and marketing, heard about the conundrum and recommended Podium.

“We really wanted to represent the positive feedback we were getting in person,” Kate said. “Podium was a great marriage to push that public raving online and firm that up. We completely flipped the perception of us online from pathetic to positive.”

Delighted with the results, Makin’ Mattresses decided to test out one of Podium’s other tools- Webchat.

Podium’s Webchat widget allows potential customers to contact a business through their website. The chat then gets rerouted to the potential customer’s phone as a text conversation.

“We’ve got to be sensitive to the way people want to communicate these days,” Kate said. “There are people who want to pick up a phone. There are people who want to send an email. There are people who want to chat. Having all of those lines of communication in place is just the best way to invite your customers in on their terms.”

Podium is proud to be part of Makin’ Mattresses’ customer experience. With their excellent customer feedback, all they needed was the power of texting to help them get the reviews of their dreams.

$200k

Mobile payments collected

305

Payment requests paid

688

Text conversations in April

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The Bridal Collection shop sat quietly, still full of white lace and taffeta, but eerily absent of the usual beaming brides and gushing mothers-in-law. Owner Lynn Crandall mulled over the situation in her chair. How could a bride say yes to a dress while saying no to social contact? And how could The Bridal Collection continue to make money when so much of their business relied on in-person interactions?

“The financial ramifications for small businesses are huge, and we’re trying to hold on,” Lynn said. “We’re still paying all of our full-time and salaried employees, and I’m literally praying each day ‘God, provide for us.’”

The Bridal Collection has already been forced to close its special occasions department, leaving prom fantasies suspended on hangers. The business now relies solely on income generated from wedding gowns– wedding gowns brides can’t try on in the store.

“The financial ramifications for small businesses are huge.”

In the face of this bleak reality, Lynn hatched a plan to bring the magic of choosing a dress into the safety of brides’ own homes.

“We’re giving brides an at-home gown viewing celebration,” Lynn said. “We’re doing curb-side, no-contact pickup with a bottle of champagne, or we’ll ship it to them complimentary. They get to have a dress try-on party at home.”

When brides find that perfect dress, they send a picture of it with a ‘yes’ sign to The Bridal Collection. The store then offers them a discount through Podium payments, a secure, straight-to-your-phone payment system.

Podium released the tool right before the quarantine hit, and it has proved essential to The Bridal Collection’s new way of doing business.

“Podium is great because it’s completely no contact,” Lynn said. “We don’t have to take credit cards into the store and get germs on the machine; we can do it completely remotely. Podium has been a godsend for us in this journey”

Despite not being able to have brides come into the store, The Bridal Collection has been able to process over $200,000 through Podium Payments during the no-contact period. Lynn encourages other businesses not to give up hope.

“Think outside the box and brainstorm new solutions.”

“Think outside the box and brainstorm new solutions,” Lynn said. “ For us, we were able to utilize Podium in a way that we hadn’t thought of or developed before. We were able to take the tools that we had access to and then brainstorm a new way to do business with them.”

While it’s no secret that local businesses are facing unprecedented challenges and an uncertain future, nothing brings us more hope and energy as a company than hearing about business owners like Lynn who are coming up with creative solutions. Now more than ever, we admire the courage it takes to run a business. We stand behind you. We support you. We respect you.

In the face of an uncertain future, does Podium really believe that America’s local businesses can think outside the box and emerge victorious?

We do.

Top 10 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Retailers

Location

Employees

Years in Business

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The coronavirus has forced retailers to adjust their operations in providing a safe environment for their customers and employees. And while most businesses have introduced sanitation and employee wellness plans, one retailer has approached the situation with a different strategy.

In the midst of the coronavirus crisis, spa and pool retailers have leaned into texting technology to offer virtual sales and curbside pick up to its customers. “People aren’t afraid to buy without looking now,” says Melissa Hutzenbuehler, co-owner of Hot Spring Spas and Pools of La Crosse. “They love texting us an inquiry and getting back to us at their leisure”.

Their team has also enabled texting features across all aspects of their business to ensure customers can easily communicate with their team. From setting up Webchat to convert website traffic to using the Payments tool to create “contactless” deposits during curbside pickup, Hot Spring Spas is providing customers with the virtual equivalent of a traditional advertising campaign.

“I tell everyone about Podium. It is a non-intrusive way to interact with customers. We actually have had one of the busiest months for the year and have met our sales goal for this month and it is only April 16th” says Hutzenbuehler. “Podium has been the best tool for us during these difficult times. It has helped us to better utilize curbside pickup by making ordering and paying convenient through texting. It has provided us a way to sell hot tubs virtually and get a down payment! We absolutely recommend it and love it!”

Now more than ever retailers are digitally transforming and finding ways to use messaging to deliver them straight to a customer’s door in a contactless way. Using Podium to shift the customer experience boldly empowers them with the tools they need to work within the constraints of the crisis and succeed.

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Location

Employees

Years in Business

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Diana Jewelers of Liverpool will celebrate 100 years in business next year and you don’t stay in business that long without learning how to adapt to new ways of doing business. This year they’ve implemented texting solutions to manage the entire customer journey with little to no face-to-face interaction.

Currently, the business is implementing Podium Payments to collect payment from anywhere. “We made it through the depression, a world war, and we won’t let this virus stop us,” said Betsy Palladino-Blasland from Diana Jewelers of Liverpool.

How a retail payment system promotes customer satisfaction

How a retail payment system promotes customer satisfaction.

Locations

Employees

Years in Business

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How Retailers Are Weathering the Storm

Brick-and-Mortar Stores: What are They?

How brick-and-mortar stores can thrive in the digital world.

Locations

232

Employees

Years in Business

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915

Webchat leads per month

118

Google reviews per month

3.8 - 4.6

change in average star rating

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How do you compete with a big-box store? Most local businesses have asked themselves this question. The answer, in the case of Coast Appliances, was to implement tools that allowed them to connect with customers in a different way.

With 17 locations across Canada, Coast Appliances isn’t necessarily small, unless you compare them to big-box stores like Lowe’s and Home Depot. Those two alone account for almost half of major-appliance sales to Consumer Reports members. Big-box stores like these often have more resources and can be hard to beat.

While Coast Appliances has traditionally and primarily focused on selling to multi-family builders and corporate accounts, Scott Wong, Marketing Manager at Coast Appliances, says that in the past few years they’ve been branching out to the retail sector. This means competing more with the Lowe’s and Home Depots of the world. As he told us, “We’re trying to grab a larger piece of the retail pie.”

Thinking out of the box.

Many of the Coast Appliance retail stores are situated in industrial areas where there isn’t a lot of natural foot traffic. “Our customers often have to make a special trip to come and see us,” Sales Trainer Greg Purgavie told us. “A lot of our business has to come from previous relationships and word-of-mouth.”

The Coast team has been focusing on finding ways to make it a more delightful experience to visit their showrooms. “We’ve been doing a lot of renovation in our stores”, Scott told us. “We’ve added live kitchens where we put on cooking demonstrations and that sort of thing. We also represent more than 50 different brands and have a large inventory, so we likely have any appliance a customer is after.”

On Greg’s side, he’s made it a point to have the best sales force in the market. “We focus a lot on teamwork and culture. Our sales teams work with each other as well as with the customer,” he told us. “So it’s a lot less cutthroat than at other appliance retailers.”

Greg and his team also take special pride in having one of the most knowledgeable sales forces out there. Each salesperson goes through a constant and continuous training program throughout the year. Additionally, many employees throughout the company have been in the business for 30 or more years and are comfortable dealing with complicated logistics and specifications, making it much easier for the customer to get the right appliances for their needs and budget.

With all of these factors, Greg and Scott are confident in Coast’s store experience. But even when you have everything dialed in at a store-level, it means nothing unless you can get more people through the doors.

Starting with reviews.

When Scott started to look more closely at ways to increase sales opportunities, he found that negative reviews were hurting them. “People would go online to look at ratings and there we’d be at the bottom of the heap,” he told us. “It wasn’t a true reflection of Coast; it was just that the only people leaving reviews were those with complaints. Every company gets negative reviews, but for us it was the only side we were showing.” They wondered how they could fix that.

That’s when Scott heard about Podium. He signed up and turned it on. Suddenly, getting five-star reviews was as easy as pressing ‘send’. The company on a whole earned more than 900 five-star reviews in the last half of the year, simply by having an effective way to ask for them. Scott was excited about the results they were getting, but he was especially excited about what came next.

The one change.

Scott told us about a phone call he had with his Podium rep, Jason, a few weeks into the preliminary stages of exploring Podium. At the time, Coast Appliances didn’t have any form of online chat. Customers were only able to connect with Coast through phone or email. “Jason showed me Webchat and I definitely felt that this—along with the review platform—had the potential to really help Coast,” Scott told us.

It’s not that Scott had never thought of adding a chat feature to the website. They were just worried that it would create more problems than it would solve.

“Personally, with a chat feature I always wondered, ‘Who’s going to sit here and respond to everything’?” Scott told us. “And then when I saw that Podium Webchat worked through text messaging, and that we could assign them to the appropriate branches, I instantly saw the possibilities with the platform.”

That’s when he put the wheels in motion with the Coast team to have Webchat added to the Coast Appliance website a few weeks after launching Podium Reviews.

Convenience meets ROI.

Since launching Podium Webchat and Reviews, sales leads have steadily increased in a way that has definitely opened up eyes at Coast. The program has essentially paid for itself. With the recent launch of Coast’s new e-commerce website, Podium has become an important tool in Coast’s fight to establish themselves in the extremely competitive arena of major appliance retail.

4.9

Average review rating

975

Google reviews

Webchat leads per month

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In business, timing is everything.

On September 4th, The Bridal Collection team received a message from a soon-to-be bride, let’s call her Annie. With her wedding only two weeks away, Annie was in panic mode.

Until that point, Annie had felt nothing but excitement for her wedding. She’d always been a planner, and had even purchased her wedding dress a year prior. Everything was planned, scheduled, ordered, and rehearsed. Except one detail—Annie had just realized that her dress no longer fit.

Annie isn’t alone. Planning a wedding is complicated, and there’s a lot of pressure to perfect every detail. Lynn Crandall, President of The Bridal Collection, understands this better than most. Lynn doesn’t just sell dresses, she creates memorable experiences. Whatever the bride’s preferences, her team will set up a charcuterie board, high tea, yogurt bar, mimosas, or something similar.

“We give them a private suite where they and their guests can sit and visit,” Lynn told us. “They’re assigned a bridal stylist who gets a sense for the bride’s hopes and dreams.” Most brides have been picturing this moment for years. It’s a business that leaves little room for error.

Once a dress is chosen, Lynn’s team does on-site alterations. Custom work isn’t easy, so occasional issues do arise. But for every 100 happy customers, Lynn might have one who leaves unhappy after experiencing a hiccup in alterations. Unfortunately, that unhappy customer is the most likely to leave a review.

In 2016, The Bridal Collection had an average review rating of 4.5 stars. Although not bad, Lynn knew that those ratings didn’t reflect the quality of her customer experience. She started searching for the source of this gap between reputation and reality.

Problem One: Bad timing made for some negative reviews.

Lynn noticed that customers weren’t leaving a review until after they had picked up their dress. But the moment they were most thrilled was after the gown viewing appointment.

As mentioned, Lynn’s team puts a lot of thought and care into making the gown viewing party a memorable experience for the bride and her guests.

Since her customers almost always leave ecstatic after the gown viewing appointment, wouldn’t that be the best time to ask them for a review? What if Lynn’s team could send the bride a text invite to leave a review directly following that appointment?

Problem 2: Giving feedback isn’t always easy.

Lynn noticed that most of their negative reviews were regarding custom alterations. She learned that, more often than not, these customers were unhappy simply because they didn’t feel comfortable voicing their concerns in person. She’d heard these customers say things like, “I didn’t want to hurt your employee’s feelings, but I thought she was hemming my dress too short.”

“We’d get a phone call from mom two weeks later saying that the bride was stressed that we didn’t do the alterations right,” Lynn told us. She started to think about that. Why didn’t the bride feel comfortable saying anything? Why was her mom the one calling two weeks later?

That’s when Lynn got an idea. What if her team could send the bride a quick text after the alteration appointment? “Our goal was to get feedback right after the appointment,” Lynn told us. “That way, we’d know for sure that the bride didn’t have any concerns.”

Problem 3: Letting leads fall through the cracks.

In the past, Lynn had tried a different chat solution on The Bridal Collection website. Her hope was that it would be a non-threatening way for customers to start the buying process. But it didn’t turn out that way. “It was robotic,” she told us. “It was a fail.” Lynn wanted her website to bring customers in, not drive them away. Her online traffic wasn’t turning into foot traffic.

After some searching, Lynn stumbled upon Podium. With Podium, her team has been able to solve all three problems.

First, they were able to automatically send a review invite through text just after the bride left her gown viewing party—while she was still on cloud nine.

“We started getting a flood of five-star reviews.”

Second, they were able to send a text message after the alteration appointment to give the bride a non-threatening chance to voice any concerns.

Finally, they were able to use Podium Webchat to turn website visitors into paying customers.

This is where Annie re-enters our story. If you remember, her wedding was only two weeks away, and she was panicking. She had sent a message to Lynn’s team through the website rather than calling or dropping in. Why? Because she was too embarrassed about her situation to do it in person or over the phone.

Within minutes, Annie had an appointment set for that same day. “I’m so grateful you were able to squeeze me in,” she replied to Lynn’s team. “See you soon.” Annie went in, got her dress fitting just right, and left relieved. When she got home, she found a review invite in her text inbox. She clicked the link and left a five-star review. But more importantly, she got the wedding she’d always wanted.

“We won by being able to chat her back immediately. It was awesome.”

On second thought, maybe timing isn’t everything. You have to reach your customers not only at the right time, but also where they spend their time—in their text inbox.

336

Average Webchat Leads per Month

Average First Response (in minutes)

1346

Total Webchat Conversations

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With eight stores in Florida and Georgia, International Diamond Center isn’t exactly a mom-and-pop shop. Their regional presence allows them to offer a better selection than smaller jewelers without sacrificing the personal touch.

Despite a boutique feel, the business struggled to keep up with the demands of online customer engagement. “You’ve gotta be constantly engaging with your consumers,” says Brian Stamey, managing principal and family owner. “We saw that we were way behind, and we really liked to be a market leader, so we started researching potential companies that could help us.”

That’s when International Diamond Center discovered Podium.

International Diamond Center was immediately struck by Podium’s simple, easy-to-use format. “It seemed pretty simplistic,” says Stamey. “It aligned with people being more intimately tied in with their mobile phones and texting, and I think it just was a natural fit.”

While Podium seemed like an obvious solution to connect the jeweler to customers, it also proved an easy system to implement. “It was pretty turn-key,” says Stamey.“We didn’t really require a whole lot of work on my side. It was just getting the information disseminated.”

International Diamond Center also knows that it if it ever needs a little help, Podium is there for extra support. “Podium is a great partner,” says Stamey. “They’re in constant communication with you. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it mentality.”

Once International Diamond Center implemented Podium’s Webchat, potential customers immediately reached out. “I think the first day we turned it on, we had probably 12 or 15 inquiries,” says Stamey.

International Diamond Center was finally able to leverage its web traffic for greater customer engagement. “It’s a way for us to really capitalize on the 35,000 to 40,000 people that are coming to our site each month,” says Stamey. “Our engagement with those customers has gone up significantly since then. If I had to guess, I think you could say it’s easily a 200 or 300-percent increase in engagement with customers. It’s less challenging for them to ask a question and get an instant answer.”

Increased online engagement has yielded in-person benefits. Some customers who’ve reached out online later visited the store to make purchases, making Webchat a helpful tool for lead generation.

With Podium set in stone, International Diamond Center is on its way to becoming a market leader.

133

Average Webchat Leads per Month

15%

of Webchat Leads Converted to Sales

29%

of Monthly Sales from Webchat Leads

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Arkansas-based James+James Furniture started out in the garage of the founder, James Smith, and quickly set itself apart from the competition by crafting quality, customizable pieces for any style.

James Smith says, “People started asking if we could build different things. The answer was always, ‘Yeah, we can build that.’ They can get exactly the size that they need and exactly the right color with exactly the right options.”

But while James+James Furniture and its reputation grew, the company’s online customer interactions stagnated. Smith says, “We had a chat thing that was just like you could stay in the chat window and chat. And it didn’t give very much engagement at all, so we turned it off,” Smith says. “With 80 percent of our customers on a mobile device, no one wants to sit there on their phone with the chat window open.”

That all changed when James+James Furniture found Podium.

James+James Furniture stumbled upon Podium accidentally. On a family trip to a trampoline park, Smith received a text message from the park requesting a review and quickly became intrigued by which service it used to do so. He soon learned that text-based review requests were just one of Podium’s many features. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’” Smith says. “And so I clicked it open and the interface was awesome. I was like, ‘Oh man, we need this.’”

James+James implemented Webchat to give customers a convenient way to reach out. Podium proved instant ROI for the growing company.

During the first full month of the company’s implementation of Podium, James+James Furniture saw impressive results. Customers not only used Webchat and other Podium features, but it even influenced purchase decisions.

“I think about 27 percent of our customers that bought from us in February used Podium at some point leading up to that purchase,” says Smith. “About 27 percent of people used it, which was surprisingly high. And the average person that used Podium spent 15 percent more than the average person that didn’t.”

Beyond the impressive results, Webchat also added a personal touch to every interaction. “As somebody is now in your text inbox, that’s a very familiar friendly place,” says Smith. “So I think it helps you earn some trust with the customer because it’s not like they’re emailing with some nameless entity.” Podium gives James+James Furniture one more way to put an extra personal touch on its already personalized business.

21X

Increase in average monthly reviews

14%

Increase in average star rating

541

Total Reviews

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Melbourne-based Australian Diamond Company knew how to make brilliant, customizable jewellery that stunned customers. However, it didn’t know how to translate those rave reviews into a flawless online reputation to attract more customers. George Bakoulas, ADC General Manager, said, “I knew that I wanted to try and maximize the amount of customer feedback that we had online by way of reviews, but there was a gap with me trying to implement a process versus coming up with a solution that enabled me to maximize the chance of us receiving customer feedback.”

241X

Increase in Average Monthly Reviews

36%

Increase in Average Star Rating

2,036

Total Reviews

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Loyalty Pawn reached out to Podium to help build the foundation for a thriving business—with a focus on customer engagement and communication. Javier says “Communication with our clients was one of the most important things. I saw that we’d be able to reach our clients and have conversations.”

Recognizing the importance of strong communication, Loyalty Pawn implemented multiple Podium products, including Reviews and Webchat. Javier explains, “We’ve been using Podium as a driver to help reach our loyal customers and to communicate through text to drive future business.”

Through Webchat, Loyalty Pawn enjoys open communication with clients, which encourages even skeptical potential customers to come into the store.

According to Javier, “We’re seeing more newer clients that visit our website, and with Webchat, they can ask questions if they felt too skeptical to come into the shop. It’s making them more comfortable before they even walk in the door.”

“Podium’s Webchat provides more than just comfort to customers. ” He concluded, “It adds a layer of convenience.”

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Ashley HomeStores of DFW is a world-class customer care organization. In addition to offering quality furniture and home decor, thousands of customers flock to their seven locations around Dallas for the experience. “Our NPS score is already pretty awesome,” says Ryan Levitz, Director of Business Development. “but any time there is a response that isn’t a 9 or a 10, we want to immediately know so we can fix anything that went wrong.”

Ryan and his team rely heavily on customer experience as a differentiator, but their data came in slowly and scattered across various platforms. “I wanted an all-in-one system.” Ryan said.

Feedback collects responses using messaging, instead of email, making it more engaging for customers. “There is a much higher response rate with messaging versus email,” according to Ryan, “which increases the amount of feedback that we need to continue improving our business!”

In less than 12 months, Ashley HomeStores of DFW collected more than 20,000 feedback results, with an average net promoter score of 91 out of 100. Not only were they able to get better results, faster than before, but with the added benefit of Podium, Ryan’s team could jump in when a customer was unsatisfied.

“We had a customer that gave us a less-than-six score because they felt lied to about a mattress. So we reached out, resolved the issue, and they came back and bought $15,000 worth of furniture.”

Feedback gives Ashley HomeStores of DFW the data to diagnose problems and the tools to turn them into solutions.

60X

Increase in Average Monthly Reviews

12.5%

Increase in Average Star Rating

435

Total Reviews

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Since 1954, Bill Smith Appliances & Electronics has provided quality sales and service to the communities they serve. Their attention to detail and quality customer service has helped them grow from a single location to seven showrooms spread throughout Southwest Florida.

Bill Smith Appliances & Electronics has tried and used nearly every method of follow up over their 65 years in business. But as the business grew, it became increasingly difficult to deliver an effective “Thank You” to their customers. “The scale became unmanageable,” recalls Bill Smith’s Vice President, Michael Lindsey. Rather than fall victim to their own success, Bill Smith searched for a solution.

One day, while buying furniture from a local retailer, Michael found exactly what he was looking for. “When I left City Furniture they said, “Hey, we’re going to send you a text.” When I got the text it said, “Thank you for choosing City Furniture, please click here to leave us a review.” I scrolled down to the bottom and saw that it was powered by Podium. When we looked at Podium, we were like, wow, this is a unique way for us to thank our customers, while also soliciting reviews.”

“The first thing that stuck out in my mind regarding Podium was the ease of use,” said Michael. “I literally set it up from my office, one evening, in less than an hour.” It wasn’t just the simplicity that Michael and his team loved, Podium was also pulling in new customers. “Prior to Podium, we were 27th on the list when you Googled “appliances, Fort Myers.” Now due to the tremendous amount of positive reviews we’re receiving, as well as other digital advertising efforts, we show up in the shopping section, on ad links, as number one, two, and three on the local Google shopping map page, and second in organic search results.”

With a deeper appreciation for the power of online reviews, Bill Smith Appliances & Electronics could finally quantify the impact of their efforts. “We were making hundreds of customers happy and satisfied each day, however, the majority of customers were not going online and sharing their experience. We’ve experienced a significant increase in all of our locations Google reviews and 5-star ratings. Our results with Podium has exceeded our greatest expectations”

60X

Increase in Average Monthly Reviews

12.5%

Increase in Average Star Rating

435

Total Reviews

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The Challenge

Bill Smith Appliances & Electronics has tried and used nearly every method of follow-up over their 65 years in business. But as the business grew, it became increasingly difficult to deliver an effective “Thank You” to their customers. “The scale became unmanageable,” recalls Bill Smith’s Vice President, Michael Lindsey. Rather than fall victim to their own success, Bill Smith searched for a solution.

The Solution

The Result

With a deeper appreciation for the power of online reviews, Bill Smith Appliances & Electronics could finally quantify the impact of their efforts. “We were making hundreds of customers happy and satisfied each day, however, the majority of customers were not going online and sharing their experience. We’ve experienced a significant increase in all of our locations’ Google reviews and 5-star ratings. Our results with Podium has exceeded our greatest expectations”

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Sherman’s, a family-owned furniture, mattress, appliance, and electronics retailer with three locations in central Illinois, knew it had happy customers. For years the company had tracked and measured customer satisfaction through a net promoter survey.

Unfortunately, the satisfaction numbers from those surveys weren’t reflected in the business’ online reviews. It wasn’t that Sherman’s had bad reviews, but they definitely weren’t representative of the overall quality of customer service consumers were receiving.

“We worked for six or seven years to build up our reviews to what they were,” said David Weiss, marketing manager for Sherman’s. “We had a 4.2 rating on Google at our Peoria location, which isn’t horrible, but we knew our reviews should be better than that.”

FINDING A BETTER WAY

Sherman’s had tried a number of different tactics to improve its online presence, but conversions weren’t as high as they would like. Weiss feels that this was because customers found the process too difficult or time-consuming.

“We would email customers a link to Google or Facebook, but a lot of people wouldn’t follow it,” related Weiss.

“What we found was that our customers didn’t want to to take the time to sign into their accounts to leave a review, so we set out in search of a tool that would simplify the process.”

Weiss had heard about Podium from another furniture dealer in Austin who had been having success with the platform. What stood out the most was the ability to send out invitations via a text message that points customers directly to the online review sites and eliminated common barriers they had run into before, such as logging in, finding the right business, etc.

SET UP WAS A BREEZE

With the help of an account executive, Weiss was able to quickly get their account set up and the relevant review sites added to the text flow. Sherman’s also needed to set up about 50 delivery and service techs with access to the app – something that Weiss was able to do in under an hour.

Adoption of the platform was pretty quick since collecting reviews is now part of their overall compensation package. To get employees even more engaged, Sherman’s offers these frontline employees $5 for every quality review attributed to them — something Podium’s Leaderboard and Attribution features help track.

“This is a significant investment, but it causes our employees to go into each job with the mindset of what do I need to do to blow this customer away and get a good review,” said Weiss. “This pays off in a lot of different ways for us. Obviously, it’s a better experience for the customer, and our delivery people and service techs are making more money, so we’ve seen less turnover and improved morale.”

LESS WORRY ABOUT NEGATIVE REVIEWS

Since implementing Podium, Sherman’s has seen impressive results. Most notably in the Google star rating of its three locations. Prior to using Podium, the business’ Google rating hovered in the low 4s, but it now steadily sits at a 4.8 across all locations.

Overall, Sherman’s has seen a 40% increase in reviews across all of the sites it is monitoring since implementing Podium, while collecting 726 new reviews in about 3 months time. Because the business has a high volume of quality reviews coming in on a daily basis, it is less worried about negative reviews when they come in.“Podium has enabled us to respond to those reviews, offer an apology and a solution, and then move on,” said Weiss.

FOCUS ON FACEBOOK

One of the features that Weiss has found most valuable from Podium is the ability to customize which review sites to emphasize in the invitation flow. After seeing tremendous success improving the business’ presence on Google, Weiss has now shifted focus to Facebook.

“We’re still at a 4.2 on Facebook, and we have nearly 600 reviews on there right now, so it’s going to take a little more time to improve than Google,” related Weiss. “But even in the short period of time we have emphasized Facebook, I have seen an increase. It’s awesome that we can focus on different sites given our needs at different times.”

But probably the biggest benefit Sherman’s has realized since implementing Podium is how the business has been able to set itself apart from the competition just by the sheer number of quality reviews it has been able to collect.

“When you search for an appliance store, a furniture store, or anything like that in our area on Google now, we not only show up as one of the main stores, but we have 10 times the reviews of our competitors and the review content is really helpful to potential customers,” concludes Weiss. “That makes it look like everyone shops here and loves us. It’s radically changed how we’re perceived online and is consistent with the experience we offer at Sherman’s.”

241X

Increase in Average Monthly Reviews

36%

Increase in Average Star Rating

2,036

Total Reviews

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Through Webchat, Loyalty Pawn enjoys open communication with clients, which encourages even skeptical potential customers to come into the store.

“Podium’s Webchat provides more than just comfort to customers. ” He concluded, “It adds a layer of convenience.”

80X

increase in average monthly reviews

17%

increase in average star rating

2.1K

total reviews

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Company

Riddle's Jewelry

Headquarters

Rapid City, SD

Industry

Retail

DEMO PODIUM

Since 1959, Riddle’s Jewelry has helped customers celebrate special moments with custom-designed jewelry made in America. Despite 65 years of good reviews, when it came to their online reputation, Riddle’s Jewelry was behind the times. “Reviews are what people are looking at when they’re finding a jeweler.” said Josh Holsworth, ecommerce manager at Riddle’s Jewelry. “You see some of your competitors and some of them had maybe 50 reviews,” according to Josh, “but most of our stores had maybe five reviews."

27X

increase in average monthly reviews

increase in average star rating

700+

total reviews

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Company

Wilson Diamonds

Headquarters

Provo, UT

Industry

Retail

DEMO PODIUM

Over time, Corrigan has seen the impact of online reviews in influencing the customer journey. Today’s consumer is much more educated and savvy than ever before and they’ve conducted significant research online before they even walk through your doors. Because of this, Wilson Diamonds focuses on collecting reviews online. Prior to implementing Podium, most of the store’s online reviews came organically. If the salespeople thought about it, they would ask customers who had a good experience for a review, but it wasn’t something the staff was proactively seeking out.

“When people are buying jewelry, they typically come into the showroom three or four times before they make the purchase, so our salespeople are able to build good relationships with them over time,” related Corrigan. “Because of those relationships, it’s been a very seamless process for us to ask for and receive reviews from our customers since we implemented Podium.”

The feature in Podium that has been most helpful to the staff of Wilson Diamonds is the mobile application. It makes it very easy for salespeople to transition from closing a transaction to inviting customers to review the business. Corrigan has developed a number of scripts to help his staff know what the most effective methods are for securing reviews. One approach frequently used is they note that they are not paid on commission, but what the customer could do to help them out is to leave an online review and mention the salesperson by name. Another helpful feature is the Reviews Dashboard. Wilson Diamonds is currently running an incentive to motivate the staff to send invites. The ability to track invitations and reviews easily from a single location has been invaluable to Corrigan.

The biggest benefit Wilson Diamonds has seen since implementing Podium is an increase in the number of online reviews as well as the frequency at which they’re coming in. In just a short period of time, the business has collected hundreds of new reviews and boasts an average overall star rating of 4.9 across all review platforms. An additional benefit that Corrigan didn’t anticipate was the teamwork online reviews have fostered. “Everyone is notified when we get a new review,” concluded Corrigan. “And there has been an increase in camaraderie among our employees that has come as a result. It has helped our employees realize the joy they bring to our customers and that’s been really cool.”

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Gallery Furniture started in the early 80’s by Jim McIngvale, also known as Mattress Mack to his customers. They started off as a single mattress store but have grown to three locations, including two large showrooms serving the eastern side of Texas.

Early on, they set themselves apart from competitors by offering same-day delivery, but as this has become standard among many large online retailers, they realized that their digital marketing and online presence needed some attention.

“We realized we needed to refocus our efforts on digital marketing and getting our name out there,” explained Daniel Marchione, Gallery’s Project Manager/Systems Administrator. “Mattress Mack has been famous with his guerilla marketing tactics that had certainly helped the business in the past, but we realized we were behind the curve on what we were doing in digital. Over the past couple of years, we have worked to ramp up our digital presence. We realized that our reviews online were lacking, so we were looking for a solution and we found Podium.”

MAKING IT PART OF THE PROCESS

Gallery Furniture has built customer feedback into many of their processes, from their digital marketing team down to the individual sales reps. Podium became a natural part of the customer journey. They combine sending invitations manually with an automated Salesforce integration to make sure each customer gets the opportunity to leave feedback. This became such an integral part of their process that the owner actually built it into their compensation plan.

“It’s such a user-friendly app that everyone was up to speed within the first day or two of signing up,” explained Marchione. “As our team honed their technique on approaching customers about leaving reviews, we started to get better and better at it. The owner of our company decided to make getting reviews part of the pay matrix for the sales team. Once he did that, the reviews increased exponentially.”

GETTING FOUND

Gallery Furniture’s improved online presence has allowed them to save money on other marketing efforts, and it has also resulted in a large uptick in web traffic and inbound calls from customers and online searchers.

“Our organic search results online now are incredible,” said Marchione. “It is amazing how we show up without even having to pay for Google search results. We’re not spending nearly as much on paid search results as we have in the past. We’ve had a ton of inbound calls as well because we always show up number one when people search for furniture in Houston. They could be searching for another store and we’ll show up on top of the list, so they will call us.”

“We have been in business for 36 years because of our customer service,” explained Marchione. “Podium has really shown us that we had a huge gap in the opportunity to receive online reviews. We have so many fans out there, but we just weren’t inviting them to review us. Podium gave us the venue to do that. Now that we are, we’re just seeing tremendous results.”

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Jerome’s Furniture is a 16-location furniture store in southern California, who has been growing consistently. They reached out to Podium when they started to realize they needed more good reviews. Jeff MacGurn, Vice President of Digital for Jerome’s Furniture, says, “Jerome’s wanted to find a way for people to easily share their positive feedback with other potential customers, get insight into their business quickly and efficiently, as well as offer easy customer communication via text messaging.”

“People don’t look at their emails very often,” MacGurn said, “but people read every single text that they get. Texting gets the job done, and we have seen our customers engage with texts way more than emails.” Not only does MacGurn feel that the Podium platform eliminates communication barriers, but that the review aspect of Podium motivates the Jerome’s team to give a better customer experience.

“The coolest part about the review aspect of Podium is that people are leaving positive reviews about specific employees,” MacGurn said. “Not only have we received more business because of all the reviews we have received via Podium, but we’ve also seen a change in motivation on our sales team, they want customers coming in asking for them. It is an easy way for our sales team to get motivated to go above and beyond.”

EASY FOR CUSTOMERS TO REACH OUT

Although MacGurn and the Jerome’s team has seen the positive effects of using text message to communicate with customers. “Customers reach out to you in so many different ways, and texting is just another way that they can do that,” MacGurn said. “Our furniture sales people aren’t typically in front of a computer, so email isn’t nearly as effective as text messaging. Our store managers and customer service team wants to respond to messages quickly. Texting allows that convenience for our team and the consumer.”

Jerome’s always has someone in Podium either responding to reviews or using the messaging application. “There are so many use cases for the Messaging Platform,” MacGurn said. “We can use it for nearly everything, we can use it to follow up on delivery, we can use it to give estimated times of delivery. It has helped to make the customer experience a lot simpler.”

HOW TO START TEXTING CUSTOMERS

MacGurn starts out by using Podium’s text messaging functionality to send out a review invite. After that, when customers respond via text message to the review they can use Podium to communicate and help answer customer questions through that message.

“I was shocked how much we could do with Podium,” Macgurn said. “Honestly, I had no idea that we could text and see reports and so many other things. We originally bought Podium for the reviews, but it has been so much more than that and has changed the way that we do business.”

Jerome’s customer success team is in charge of responding to the messages within Messaging Platform. “We often get questions like ‘hey there is a problem with my delivery’, or ‘where is the delivery truck?,’” MacGurn said. “But Podium’s Messaging Platform gives us the ability to respond quickly and easily.”

WHY PODIUM?

Podium Messaging Platform has allowed business to flow more easily for Jerome’s Furniture. “Podium is worth every dollar you spend on it,” MacGurn said. “It lowers all communication barriers and allows us to better communicate with our customers in the way that they want to be communicated with. If you want to be successful, buy Podium. Texting is how people communicate in this day and age. And text messages are by far the most effective in reaching customers.”

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Rasmus Auctions is an online auction company based in the DC area and is one of the first traditional outcry auction companies to go internet-only. They chose to go online back in the late ‘90s when the owner, Chris Rasmus, had the foresight to know that that’s where things were headed. Having an online presence is important to all businesses, but that’s especially true for an online business like Rasmus Auctions.

“Technology has always been an important thing to us,” said Rasmus. “Because most of our buyers find us on Google, we found that it was difficult for us to really tell our story the way we wanted to because, as so often happens, the only customers motivated enough to leave online feedback were those with an axe to grind.”

CULTIVATING TRUST WITH CUSTOMERS

Being a primarily online business, customer trust and reputation were absolutely necessary to Rasmus’ success. Without the face-to-face component that many local businesses have, they needed a way to build trust with their customers in a modern way.

“We provide great customer experiences,” said Rasmus. “You can trust us, and by extension, you can trust the things that we’re selling. We just needed to figure out a way to get that customer feedback online so people could come to their own determinations about how great we were by listening to it from others. That’s why we knew we needed a product like Podium that is closely integrated with Google. We’re a service business that doesn’t have a physical storefront. And that made it that much more difficult for us to get traction on Google, because it was kind of aimed more towards businesses that had a storefront.”

BUILDING A HABIT OF FEEDBACK

Rasmus Auctions has seen a lot of great feedback from customers because they understand the importance of building feedback into the purchase process. If a business can determine the best time to ask for customer feedback, and then train their team to be consistent in asking, they will see amazing results.

“We find that Podium really helps us communicate with buyers at the moment when we know that they have a good feeling,” explained Rasmus. “We realize that those feelings can be somewhat perishable so we send the invite as soon after purchase as possible.”

PODIUM GETS QUICK RESULTS

When Rasmus Auctions first started using Podium, they had some clear expectations of what the platform should do. Podium met and exceeded those expectations in a few short months, and now they are starting to explore additional features that can help them in other aspects of their business.

“We really set out to get a toehold into a positive rating, and we did that very quickly,” explained Rasmus. “From there, we tried to achieve some level of gravitas so that we were not just showing that we were good, but far outpacing what competitors we have in the marketplace. And we’ve managed to do that as well. It’s worth every dime I’m paying for it. I know other people who probably should be using it that won’t, and that actually gives me a competitive advantage.”

LASTING IMPACT

Quick results are great to boost a business’ online rating, but the lasting impact of a healthy and active online presence are building up a loyal customer base and a shining reputation for future customers.

“Podium has enabled potential customers to search Google and self-determine that we’re good guys with a good service,” concluded Rasmus. “It goes a long way to helping establish us as the leader in our market space, by comparison our competitors either have very few or very poor reviews. For anybody who already knows us and does business with us, they already know we’re special. Those who don’t know we’re great are people who haven’t used us yet. They’re relying on the opinions of others, and when they see it on Google or on Facebook, it gives them a great deal of confidence and comfort.”

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The Challenge

No one likes to get a negative review, especially when your business is focused on delivering high-quality customer service like Rotmans Furniture. Despite having a vast majority of its customers leaving the store satisfied, Rotmans struggled to garner quality reviews.

That was until David Rotman of Rotmans, started to reach out personally to every individual who had ever left the business a bad review, dating back as far as 2011. David would offer an apology, do what he could to rectify the situation, and when he was sure that they were satisfied, he would ask if they would consider revising their review.

This practice helped Rotmans significantly improve its online reputation and resulted in a 20 percent increase in revenue. However, the process was very time consuming. That’s why Rotman began to seek out a way to automate the review invitation process to help eliminate a lot of the manual work he was putting in. “When I heard about Podium, it almost sounded too good to be true,” Rotman recalled. “Being able to easily text all of our customers with an invitation to leave a review and achieve a high response rate is an online marketer’s dream.”

The Solution

Rotman first came across Podium at a Furniture First Symposium and was impressed by how quickly and easily Podium customers were able to collect reviews. What was most impressive, however, were the results these businesses were able to achieve from such a small investment.

Furniture stores typically have to spend a lot of money on advertising and marketing, and a lot of times it’s just a shot in the dark as to what will work and what won’t. “The cost was so small compared to the possible benefits we could see,” recalled David. “There was really nothing to lose and so much to gain if Podium really was what I thought it was.”

One of the biggest benefits Rotmans has achieved since implementing Podium is just the sheer amount of time they have been able to save. “Podium saved us a lot of time that we used to spend emailing customers and asking them for reviews, which made the number of reviews we collect go way up” related Rotman. “Now instead of getting about five reviews a month, we can get five reviews a day.”

The Result

Rotmans is also utilizing Podium Messenger to stay better connected with its customers, giving the store the ability to respond more quickly to upset customers and build better relationships with the happy ones. Additionally, Rotman is able to more easily monitor reviews and respond when appropriate directly from inside Podium.

On many occasions this has helped turn a bad experience into a positive one. An example that happened recently involved a woman who had ordered a bed, but once it arrived she noticed something wrong with the box spring and felt the mattress was too firm. However, what she was most upset about was the waiting period for the replacement mattress she wanted.

“Once I saw the bad review, I called her up right away,” David stated. “I sent her a reimbursement check for a mattress topper she purchased to make the mattress softer. I also sent a technician out look at the box spring, which we are replacing for her. All of that effort paid off. She was so happy that she changed her one-star review to a five-star. Podium helped us do that. It helps us improve communication with literally each and every customer.”

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Spencer’s TV & Appliance has been in business for 45 years. And you don’t stay in business that long if you aren’t providing a high-quality customer experience. Despite all those years of good customer service, Spencer’s online reviews didn’t reflect that.One of the biggest problems that seemed to be inhibiting them was finding the right time to ask their customers for a review. That was because the customer experience with Spencer’s typically isn’t over until their appliance is delivered.Asking for a review too early led to very poor response rates, but asking too late didn’t help either. So the result was oftentimes only receiving reviews from the small number of customers that had a bad experience.

“When something went wrong like our delivery guy scratched their floor or there was a problem with the appliance, that’s when our customers were motivated to leave a review,” said Matt Kellso, IT & Digital Marketing Director at Spencer’s. “We make about 350-400 deliveries per day and less than one percent of those people were having a bad experience. We needed to find a way to capture the voice of the vast majority of our customers who had a good experience.”

In an effort to improve its online reputation, Spencer’s decided to give Podium a try. To ensure success, Kellso and his team worked hard to find the right time to send the review invitation. Ultimately, what has worked best for them is automating the review process at the time of delivery.

Through Podium’s robust API, they were able to connect directly to their delivery and logistics software to automatically trigger invitations when the order was marked delivered. The integration places an API call to Podium every 20 minutes, ensuring that invitations are sent when service is still top of mind for the customer. With the integration in place, the number of reviews coming in has increased significantly. “Having the ability to send review invites almost immediately after delivery to all of our customers has been a big win for us,” said Kellso. “We really like that it creates a closed loop system for collecting feedback.”

Now that Spencer’s is receiving a large number of positive reviews on a daily basis, employees no-longer have to explain away bad reviews. Many of the customers that frequent Spencer’s 12 locations in the greater Phoenix area do so because of the business’ stellar online reputation. Since implementing Podium in May of 2016, the business has improved its Google rating from 3 stars to 4.7 stars. It has also collected more than 4,000 new reviews across all platforms. “If you look at our Google rating, it’s nearly five stars across the board and that has certainly helped us a lot,” stated Kellso. “We’ve started to invest more in Google advertising and having that tied into our reviews has really helped improve our response rates.”

Products

Solutions

Resources

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About Mattress City

The Challenge

The Podium Solution

Results & ROI

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Reviews

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About Duerden’s Appliance & Mattress

The Challenge

Managing customer expectations

Cumbersome warehouse and delivery communications

Fragmented payment processes

The Podium Solution

Better, faster sales communication

Improved internal communication

Streamlined payments

Results and ROI

→ 2,000 new leads

→ 3,300 efficient conversations

→ 90 minute average time to payment

Duerden’s provides a world-class experience with Podium

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About CD One Price Cleaners

The Challenge

Challenge #1: Low response rates and limited SMS functionality in legacy system

Challenge #2: Missed opportunities from relying on email for both NPS surveys and online reviews

Challenge #3: Lack of visibility at the store and corporate levels

Challenge #4: Customer experience designed for growth

The Solution

Podium Reviews

Podium Surveys

Podium Inbox

Results and ROI

Result #1: 168% increase in feedback survey response rate

Result #2: 1,381% increase in review response rate

Result #3: Improved, more personalized customer experience

Conclusion

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About Mattress Firm

The Challenge

Challenge #1: Asking for reviews was a clunky, disjointed customer experience

Challenge #2: Covid-19 brought on an urgent need for digital transformation

Challenge #3: The delivery confirmation process was manual and often undocumented

The Podium Solution

Podium Reviews

Podium Website Chat

Podium Inbox

Results and ROI

Result #1: A better, more modern customer experience

Result #2: Created a seamless digital-to-physical experience for every customer

Result #3: Gathered 305,278 new reviews in 2020 while keeping a 4.8-star rating

Result #4: Improved online reputation as a competitive advantage

Result #5: 148,383 Website Chat leads in 2020 leading to millions in revenue

Result #6: Fewer mattress delivery errors

Conclusion

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The Challenge

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Key Results:

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