Act! Reviews

Pros

The fact that I was able to use the product immediately with no instruction was a great pro. Entering data and retrieving info about a client is easy, and building history of calls, Email messages, letters in a record is great.

Cons

I am not happy with support as all they do is provide a fix when there is a problem, but not direction in how to build reports or use other functionality. I have had to fix the same problem with direction from their service group several times. If I ask for help with reports they tell me I need to find a consultant for that.

Pros

I like the fact that a team of 5 can share effectively in real time, I like the ease of changing layouts and adding fields, and with Seamless the ablity to easily prdcue high quality documenation. It's link to outlook and ODBC is good and it is a stable, which being at the core of our business is a good thing

Cons

There are many things I think we could do to be more productive but can't, and we do see fields being changed or lost "by themselves". The web version was a poor version of the Pro, and we haven't been able to make it available when offline, which is a frustration.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Switched From

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Much better value for money, and lower overall overheads meant better for us as a asmall business

Pros

It does everything I do - but better. Marketing automation and data capture has transformed how we work

Cons

There's nothing not to like about ACT! At all.

Pros

At this moment, I am struggling to think of anything positive to say about my Act! experience. Both my boss and I have had problems since we bought it. I have lost entire days' worth of sales time on the phone with their tech support trying to fix issue after issue. And to make matters worse, they keep telling me to give them more money if I want better, faster, more competent customer service. All I want is for the program to work correctly and do what they promised it would do!

Cons

This program is seriously glitchy, and the customer service experience has been bad. I have spent countless hours on the phone trying to get issues resolved. And to add insult to injury, they keep telling me that if I want better customer service and faster, more professional support I need to give them more money. If you believe in your product then, stand behind it and fix it. My boss and I have spent enough time (and money via lost sales revenue) dealing with Act's technical issues already, so I wish they would stop telling me we need to shell out more.
After two days on the phone with them, having been escalated to their Level 3 support guy, my Outlook started to have problems immediately after hanging up with him. I have never had a single problem with Outlook since I started using it. Over the last two days, three different tiers of tech support have remotely accessed my laptop, gone into my Outlook as administrators, and messed around with it. Though they managed to fix the mail merge issues I was initially having with Act!, they clearly messed up my Outlook along the way. Now they claim it is a complete coincidence that Outlook started sending me error messages the moment I hung up with their top tier tech guy. They keep telling me the problems are not related, it is solely the problem of Outlook, they are not experts in Outlook, and I should call Outlook's tech support for help.
Clearly, it is not a coincidence or unrelated. And clearly, they are confident enough in their Outlook expertise to go into my program and mess with it. And as tech support for a software program that works with Outlook, they should be trained and qualified to work with Outlook in the first place. I have asked repeatedly to have their top tier guy call me back. He knows what he did, so he should be able to track down his mistake and fix it. But they keep saying they can't do that without me shelling out more money.
As if all of that wasn't enough, during my last conversation with their support, I had to force the rep to stop trying to get me off the phone and to fix the new problem that had cropped up with Act! just today: the loss of my email history. It took her close to an hour, and she finally discovered that my email history was now gone from Act! because one of the three techs who has remotely accessed my computer over the last two days accidentally replaced my database with a demo database. And even in light of that, she still tried to say that the issue with Outlook had nothing to do with anything their tech staff did. She continued to insist it was all just a coincidence.
I told her I felt the time had come to talk to a supervisor, and I asked her to put one on the phone. After placing me on hold once again, she finally came back and said a supervisor was unavailable, and one would have to call me back in 10 minutes. It ended up taking close to an hour to hear from him. He did finally fix the Outlook problem, but when I asked him what I should do if the error messages come back in an hour or two, he said I had to start all over again from the bottom. The whole routine: wait on hold, start with a low-level tech, slowly work up the ladder, all of it. That or pay the fee.
The next day, the Outlook error message came back! And I had to lose that day as well trying to get them to fix it. I spoke to my boss, and he said the same thing happened to him a while back, where they tried to blame Outlook. So my boss said he started a conference call with the Act! tech guy and the Microsoft tech guy on the phone at the same time, and lo and behold, the problem turned out to be with ACT, not Microsoft.

Pros

ACT! is the best CRM available and has stood the test of decades. No other CRM comes close. It's report structure is unmatched as is the customizable features. ALSO - exporting and backup are relatively easy to use. It has a very nice user-intuitive interface.

Cons

ACT! is no longer available as a purchasable software but only as a subscription. Also the syncing of clients from email would be nice as well as better syncing between email client and ACT!

Pros

Ability to customize the product for my preferred activities - follow-ups, invoicing, managing client relations, sales pipeline tracking and more.

Cons

Nothing to complain about as they've gotten the product to work efficiently with the past 6 or 7 versions. Upgrading used to be inconvenient but they've made the upgrade process seemless

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Excel

Reasons for Switching to Act!

I got it the software at a great price back in 1994...maybe $25 for the disc.

Pros

You can input any information and update it and the information can be seen by anyone in the organization. Makes communication between teams very simple and quick.

Cons

I am not a fan of the way they use multiple contacts past two for a business. If there are a list of people to communicate with each profile has up to two contacts, with more than two a new profile for the company has to be created, creating multiple profiles for each company which can cause confusion for other sections of the company, including processing payments and sending to the wrong contact at the other end or returning a product to the wrong section of said business.

Pros

initially, I liked the ability to manage my various lists of contacts.

Cons

Lots of duplicates get created by not being able to have a master database with the option of placing contacts in multiple categories and then creating separate lists per project that do not change as the master database is updated. I want to be able to see what contacts I sent information to two months after I built the list so I am clear where we had a miss when we learn of updates/new contacts, but Act does not allow that.

Pros

90% of it, there seems to be some glitches with the new version but the rest is wonderful

Cons

Years worth of notes seem to be missing

Pros

There isn't much I like about using Act. It is clunky and there are a lot better CRM tools out there that are much more sophisticated and are better for integrating multiple programs. It is a relatively easy tool to use although it does not do a lot of what we would like it to be able to use.

Cons

Act seems to be patched together from add-ons over the year and has not had a comprehensive UX refresh. It also is not simple to integrate with our other software like a lot of other software tools are

Pros

Easy to setup and have customized fields. They have an option to run on your own server to avoid monthly fees of other CRM options.

Cons

Once you have over 10,000 contacts. It is harder and slower to organize CRM. Works much better for smaller contact lists.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Cost of alternatives were much higher for similar features.

Pros

I have been using ACT for over 25 years and have seen lots of versions. I like its flexibility and that I can put users into multiple groups, It would be impossible to design a program that did everything everybody wanted it to but ACT comes close. I use it for sales, marketing, personal groups I coordinate, keeping track of some of my customers' customers.

It can interact with Outlook and Google's calendar if you use either of those programs. I am a Premium member. The bad side to that is it is a little pricey - about $0 a month. The good side is that I always have the most up to date version. The customer support is wonderful if you are a premium member. Whenever Microsoft Windows has an update a lot of my programs need some adjusting. ACT requires the SQL to restart but that is a simple fix. If/when I have had issues I couldn't fix I just made a call and their support team was terrific in helping me.

I like the fact that it is cloud based so I can access it on my tablet or cell phone or any computer anywhere. At my office I use the offline version and simply update the sync to the cloud. I have it set to update overnight also. One of the features I like best is the history. It is great to be able to look back to meetings, calls etc to see what I said, did etc. The library of forms is very useful also - create a form, letter - whatever - and you have a pre printed template you can utilize for multiple clients or for just one.

It holds tons of contacts also.

Cons

I wish it had more options for the ID/Status cells. The group function sort of does that but not like I need it to. Having 3, 4, 5 or more ID/Status cells would be very useful. Most of my clients fall into more than one category.

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

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

None that I can think of...over our old ACT versions.

Cons

We are a long time user of Act with 64000 contacts, and thought about an upgrade and tried the newest software. Connection to ACT did not work, called customer service which took DAYS to respond, and only with trivial solutions or told us out browsers were inadequate. We cannot use cloud based software, as many of our sales persons need to travel and out of internet on the road. We asked about purchasing a copy for local server use, and they STILL have not called back.

Uses alot of memory and crashed the test computer a couple of times.

I reviewed the posts, and many are favorable, but their usage is very different than ours. Most of the positives come from short time users who have no other experience. If you have alot of contacts, doubt if this will work for you.

Pros

I was probably one of the first purchasers of Act. It is a great program that needs a company to put some serious thought behind making it work better. After shopping several other CRM software's I still think it is above the rest in both user friendly and functionality. You price for the product is more than fair (in fact, I think low) but the software runs like it is somebody's part time job.

Cons

Customer service is the worst. The guys in India are great and I have nothing bad to say about them but is there some reason I need to sit on a phone 45 minutes waiting to speak to the representative? Again I think Act could be the CRM leader but I don't see much improvement over the past few years. The principles of this company have sat back and let opportunities walk by not focusing on the customers needs. With all the apps and technologies available Act should have more to offer.When I purchase a product I do not expect to have to spend hours chasing down my answers through videos.

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 is vert easy to use and customize to the users needs. Very little training is required for new users

Cons

None it is a very good CRM for marketing purposes

Pros

Easy to use

Cons

Some of the features I will never use and some of the features take some time to learn how to use.

Pros

I have been a user of the ACT! program since I became a Realtor in 1990. It is one of the most versatile programs around. I am only using parts of the program necessary to run my business. It allows a comprehensive amount of information on each individual on record or family history. All activity is recorded in the history file for future reference. All Emails, letters and correspondence is attached to the individual for future reference. The groups that can be set-up

Cons

There is nothing that I dislike about this program. It has all of the features that are needed to run a business. There are also features included that are helpful in record keeping and developing schedules for a smoother day to day operation.

Pros

Organization and logic

Cons

Syncing with Outlook and Gmail can be difficult.

Pros

The only reason I use this software is that I have used it for 25+ years, too embedded to change

Cons

The Company, the Pricing and mostly the Customer Service. How crazy is I have to pay extra to speak to someone in the US that speaks English. Appalling. The response time is poor. I requested a password change via email as it is set up to do because it would not take mine; never got the reset password email. I called the sales number thinking they would at least ANSWER the phone. He told me there was an issue with the reset email and customer service (which I pay an extra $480.00 a year for) can help... on hold too long, left a message for a call back.... waiting..... Years ago ACT was amazing, since the transitions it has become progressively worse. The Product itself is good, the sales people are nice. That is it. I do wish I had the time to research options and change, perhaps in 2021.

Pros

I can track my customers and their email addresses.

Cons

The confusion with accessing customers.