Act! Reviews

Pros

I like this software. Being able to improve my communication, increase my sales and ensure the loyalty of my customers is so magical! And the ease of remote tasks is just incredible. And to think it's so easy to use!

Cons

Nothing to complain about! This software works like a charm and is easy to use.

Pros

Mostly used Act's features of contact management and marketing automation in CRM, it has a feature that brings together all of the customer data into a centralized database. Using automation tool is so easy and helps you track every steps.

Cons

Not so many features but the essential features are enough to get what is really needed. The support for the product has ended.

Pros

What's not to like First of all Client set up is a breeze! Once entered all notes are time dated. To email your client their is an Icon click on it and it automatically opens up Outlook and fills out the email address. Send and email and it keeps a copy of the email you sent to them and or received from them time dated. It allows you to set have set groups of which you can email everyone in that group. For instance maybe you have people who use tank cars, people may use box cars or need certain products you can have send a blast just to those people with a simple click on the group or groups. Want to see the locations a client there is an ico click on that a google maps opens and you can do a satellite view. Suffice it to say it does everything but wash the dishes.

Cons

Nothing! The survey is asking for a min of 40 words to describe what I don't like ok its not free!

Pros

Our office has been using this product since before I started. It is a solid database program and if that is all you want to do is have a large database of contacts, then this performs well.

Cons

I dislike how this is still only available for windows computers which makes communicating information in an office with both Mac and PC impossible. Also, the outlook plug in that allows emails to be synced with a contact in ACT will only link emails to the PRIMARY contact. So that means you have to manually sync that. If you are emailing over 100 emails a day, you end up either spending most of your time manually syncing contacts or just foregoing this feature. Also, you can only add 4 contacts to a company. Often times, we need to have upwards of 6-10 contacts for a company so the inability to add more is a huge issue. And since ACT isn't online, any changes made on any employee computers while not connected to the server means no one else has access to that info until they make it back to the office to sync. Which means our data is never fully up to date. There are so many problems with this software that we often don't try to take advantage of any of the other functions.

Pros

Easy to set up and does what it says on the tin

Cons

We are happy so there are no cons for us

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Pros

the basic CRM function, the basic CRM function

Cons

priced a little high, some minor bugs still in the product, differences between Web and local PC app

Pros

There is nothing good or helpful about this software.

Cons

The trial is not really a trial because you cannot see how their marketing automation works.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Pros

Familiar from days gone past. I like the 'promises' that ended up being misrepresentations (I'm avoiding the word lie)

Cons

Misrepresentation despite very clear presale's objectives being defined. Could not 'try' since marketing is not a feature available to free trial.

Pros

Act imports large data at once... without loss of any records. Stable, desktop version. Create shortcuts.

Cons

Everything is fine. It was hard to contact sales department due to high call volume but they did get back to me quickly.

Pros

I have all of my contacts and call notes in one organized location

Cons

So far, I have no negative comments to make regarding the act program

Pros

There are multiple benefits to using Act as reported by our users. The Act database allows for a large quantity of information to be stored, meaning we were able to decommission several other systems holding various bits of customer data by merging it into Act.

We have found pricing to be competitive on a per-licence basis which suits us as a small team working within a non-profit organisation. Act makes it easy for users to update already stored customer/company information, so we always have up-to-date data for contacting, addresses, etc.
Communications to customers/companies are tracked in Act so other members of the department can see who has communicated with who, and what the correspondence was – this is useful if a member of staff is off and another needs to pick up some workload.

On the technical side, updates and hotfixes are provided regularly and it is relatively easy to install these during periods of downtime. The UI is easy to navigate, with clearly labelled menus and an in-built help area.

Cons

We have found it somewhat difficult to integrate Act with our current systems and have resorted to manually exporting CSVs with information to import into our systems. This is a legacy process and may have been improved upon however, we haven’t looked into this.

We have also had to purchase add-ins to enable certain features such as opportunities tracking, but Act plays well with these add-ons, so this is not too much of an issue for us.

From an admin’s perspective, it has proven difficult to set up an automatic installation that works with our MDT deployments, but we roll out images with Act on rarely, so this isn’t too much of an issue.

Perhaps in future, updates could be made to the UI to make it look a little less dated and bring it up to clean, modern, standards.

Pros

This is a robust software program. We have added many custom fields that allows us to track a lot of data really dig into for trends and statistics. We love how history is captured a for all the activity we do for and with a client. We rely on the relationship tab heavily as multiple people are involved in a transaction. We are really enjoying the new Marketing Automation. It has a lot of robust features that we are just beginning to tap into. We also like the groups feature. We have hundreds of groups that we can run reports and create statistics from. We can see how many groups a contact is part of which helpful as well. I like the statistics ACT generates from drip marketing. Knowing what emails bounced back or who opted out helps us improve our data.

Cons

When searching for a person, it doesn't give you the option of having similar names - the spelling must be exact. It crashes when we are in the social updates tab. Customer Service: Often the techs are hard to understand. The time we spend on the phone with customer service on average lasts about 1/2 to an hour depending on the issue. That is a big interruption to our workflow in the office.

One thing I wish ACT would do is send to 2 emails at once. When sending out an eblast, it pulls from the email field. If there is more than one email address followed by a semicolon, it won't send to both. It bounces back.

Pros

ACT! is working hard to make itself my highly valued CRM/Partner. Frequent functionality upgrades and increased reliability. Excellent technical assistance.
Expanded training videos and knowledge database. Act CRM is well integrated with Marketing Automation. It is not an add-on, but is central to and easy to use.

Cons

I have used ACT! for a long time. For much of the time, I was intimidated by its complications. Weak training did not help. A steep learning curve also required that I learn by trial and error. Much time was wasted learning to use ACT!'s power. ACT! 's muscle was hidden by requiring that I learn on my own instead of having good training.
ACT! would benefit from seeking out suggestions from users as to improvements in training. Some of these stunning features took forever to learn on my own.

Pros

Everything in a Contact or Company record's layout can be customized, moved around, hidden on a per-user basis, and otherwise manipulated however your organization needs it to be. My company makes heavy use of this feature, having multiple team-based layouts that present the most important data to those teams prominently. We also greatly enjoy the software's ability to perform advanced queries on the data that can be saved and re-run with a single click to provide accurate reports and drill down to specific needs in moments.

Cons

There are quite a few features that feel incomplete or at least not fully integrated. For example, the software comes with the ability to create and Mail Merge templated emails that imports information like a contact's name, and the Smart Tasks feature allows you to automatically perform certain tasks including sending an email to a contact, yet for some reason you can't do both - that is, you can't set a Smart Task to perform a Mail Merge to a templated email and send the result, meaning that the automated emails cannot contain information personal to the contact such as their name.

Pros

Perfect fit for mid-sized businesses. Great price point. Only truly hybrid solution that allows you to use Act both on your desktop and in a hosted environment.

Pros

The way it’s supposed to work is ok. Not great. But getting it to work is a very heavy lift. And with inadequate support, it’s totally up to the user to figure it out.

Cons

Where do I start? Bottom line is that setup for marketing automation is nearly impossible. I’ve used successfully ACT! for more than 20 years. But marketing automation is a disaster. The documentation is unhelpful, and in some places, downright incorrect. It has lots of broken links. And their support staff, all offshore, knows nothing about how to help with the marketing automation feature. I had to hire someone who finally figured it out, by trial and error, after several weeks of work.

Pros

Act itself is as a good database software. Compering to previous version synchronized with Swift Page it has a better platform to create a template. There are other things you improve but for our small company we do not use them (like several times of sending same e-mail to one customer)

Cons

In Marketing Automation:
- you can not add and SAVE our data base fields in the template
- you can not send an e-mail from the template to one person (only to the group)
- you can not sent an e-mail to lookup (every time you must create the group from lookup)
- may e-mails is getting lost (in our 2 campaigns about 20% e-mails were not delivered)
In e-marketing
- you can not add and SAVE our data base fields in the template
******
In your previous version of ACT I was able to add fields from my database SAVE them in the template and send them to lookup without a need to create the group.
******
And your customer service ??? I believe you can do better work.
For example - I wrote an e-mail to you about month ago - with totally no answers from you.

Pros

I like that they created a cloud version for people on the go.

Cons

The over design or look of the desktop version is old and kind of dated. It can be updated if I choose to. But that will take time. A larger selection of templates would be excellent.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Pros

it was inexpensive. but you get what you pay for.

Cons

No tech support. ACT is always putting out a new version. each new version trips off problems and requires new integrations and updates that they do not tell you about and cause integration issues with all of your other software expecially microsof.

Pros

It literally runs all aspects of my life seamlessly.
The recent upgrade was assisted by your technician, [sensitive content hidden]. I have been resisting an upgrade for years (I think I was on 20 because I was concerned of a failure during the process. He was outstanding and to sum up my impression of him in succinctly:
very Patient, very intelligent and very knowledgeable

Cons

Nothing

Pros

I liked this software to run my credit repair business. Keep track of letter management and clients. It was easy at first.

Cons

After you purchase your license, in a year or 2 they discontinue the version and you have to pay for the license all over again. I had purchase 3 licenses and wanted to purchase a 4th one and they said I couldn't that I would have to upgrade to the monthly fee version where you pay monthly per license including for the licenses I already had. Now this year they discontinued the licenses I already purchased, they want me to upgrade and pay 550 per license all over again because they have a new version and will not give support nor fixes to the older versions. This is insane. I pay them for a license so they discontinue the product and expect me to purchase all licenses again. ON top of that, it is glitchy, it continue disconnects from Outlook. You call customer support and someone in India answers and they are clue less. Every time Outlook does an update or act updates it completely looses all integration. OH, and they give you 0 customer service, you have to pay for that separately.

Pros

It is easy to use when it actually works. I receive emails advising my current version is expiring quite often so it keeps me informed regularly.

Cons

The syncing feature doesn't not always work between the different platforms that we have in our office. In an office of Sales Reps, we need a CRM that will sync in real time but sometimes this CRM won't sync for an hour which makes it difficult for us to schedule appointments for our Sales Reps.

Pros

ACT has been around for a long time, as has Swiftpage who aquired them. The software itself has continued to evolve and improve, but hasn't lost the overall feel it has always had. What I like the most is that they have cloud AND desktop platforms for those that might not need cloud services. They also have a large number of plans available, are affordable, and there are a good number of independent technicians out there that can help you with your data, and design third party add-ons too.

Cons

The recent change that does not let owners of much older versions of the software activate what they already own has me concerned.

Pros

Act has a lot of the features more expensive CRM’s offer without sacrificing usability or features. It is feature rich and simple to use.

Cons

Act hasn’t had many changes in the last two years. I would like to see more growth for this product.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Pros

Online features make it easy to access data.

Cons

The UI could have some significant improvements. Immediate suggestions for the online version would be:

- Include keyboard shortcuts
- Ability to clear the search function with the click of a button
- Improve layout editing more user friendly