Podium is the other giant in the category alongside Birdeye, but its angle is fundamentally different: messaging first, reviews as a byproduct. Founded in 2014 in Lehi, Utah by Eric Rea and Dennis Steele, Podium built its early business around the insight that customers prefer to text businesses, and that texting the review link after a job doubles response rates. Today it serves tens of thousands of HVAC, home-service, retail, and SMB customers with a unified inbox spanning SMS, webchat, Google Business Messages, Facebook, and email.
For HVAC, the Podium story centers on the AI Employee - a GPT-powered agent that lives in Podium's inbox and can answer webchat, respond to after-hours texts, and book appointments directly into ServiceTitan without a human CSR. That pairs with automated post-job review requests via SMS (typically 15-20% response rate vs 1-3% on email), a unified inbox for all customer messages, text-based payment collection, text marketing campaigns, and reputation monitoring across Google, Facebook, and other sites. The ServiceTitan integration is native: dispatch events fire reviews, AI Employee books into the ServiceTitan dispatch board.
Pricing is quote-only and historically starts around $399/month for the base platform, with AI Employee as an add-on that can push total monthly cost to $600-1,000+ for a small HVAC shop. Podium is a premium tool and has drawn mixed reviews around billing practices and cancellation, but the core product for HVAC - SMS reviews plus unified messaging plus AI booking - is best-in-class. Best fit is 5+ truck HVAC operators who are serious about digital-first customer experience.