Act! Erfahrungen

Vorteile

It is very simple to use and yet very powerful. It provides me with Notes and Histories and as many fields as I need to put in data about my customers and vendors. It is linked to my phone as well as my admins data. I really cannot see running my business without ACT.

Nachteile

really nothing to complain about. they do updates and patches to fix any issues I have ever encountered

Vorteile

The Act! for Advisors software has been modified to meet the requirements of a financial advisor which includes being able to input information regarding insurance contracts. The new Marketing Automation is an great way to send out Newsletters, etc.

Nachteile

They have lots of online resources/video's to learn the Marketing Automation. You can also speak to customer service but they recently cut their remote access where you can have customer service work on your computer to help answer/show you how to do things with the marketing automation.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Warum Act! gewählt wurde

Salesforce was cost prohibitive.

Zuvor genutzte Software

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Act!

Cost while not sacrificing the overall features.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Act!

Cost of alternatives were much higher for similar features.

Vorteile

I have been using Act! for decades via its various owners and takeovers. It served me well in sales and marketing, and now I use it to track my legal clients and court hearings, trials, etc.

Nachteile

It does not work in Windows 11, which came with my new computer. Your Tech Support was no help, telling me simply that Microsoft knows about it and "someday" will have a fix. Meanwhile, with a local technician, I had to roll back to Windows 10 (hundreds of dollars paid), then I had to pay a remote Act! specialist (not your employee) to help to get it to "work" even in Windows 10. It barely works now, freezing up constantly and repeatedly throughout my workday. It is practically useless, but I bear with it until I can find another product that works for me.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

ACT! is my client record system of choice. We've been using ACT! for at least twelve years. I find it is an easy way to track client details and history. Data entry is simple. I particularly like the fast Search function. Keyboard shortcuts make the application even easier to use.

I have tested other CRMs. ACT! has always ranked top of the list for me. ACT!'s annual updates have always improved the product. Customer support has improved year by year too.

Nachteile

The Outlook interface is good but the synchronising facility could be better. Sometimes we experience hang-ups when synchronising selected lists between ACT! and Outlook.

Vorteile

There seems to be a lot of functionality and ability to work in-depth with contacts and the information provided with the contacts.

Nachteile

It is not easy to have more than one person work off of the same database and keep everything integrated. We sync with Gmail and at this time it only allows for one account to sync email messages. We can sync the contacts to multiple accounts with the help of a third party software but only one for the Gmail messages.

Vorteile

Easy to use - feels familiar even on first use and isn't hard to get started.

Nachteile

Cumbersome and slow. Once you start getting thousands of contacts in the system get use to watching the hourglass. Server needs to be restarted weekly. Their cloud based solution is lacking in features and not as mobile friendly as other options.

Vorteile

I like the simplicity of the platform, training users was simple and adoption relatively painless. Also the data was able to be stored locally which was nice.

Nachteile

What i don't like is what happened when we decided to move on from ACT to a different solution. Exporting notes was nearly impossible and we had to pay for a 3rd party tool to accomplish this.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

Started using Act about 25 years ago. Have added contacts since and used most of the features. Over time the use of certain features such as mass mailings to customer lists have faded, and now occasionally by e-mail. Over time I have come to value how I can locate someone that was a customer years ago, and have a complete record of a transaction, conversation or specific subject we were involved in. You have to learn to use for nearly every phone conversation or piece of correspondence. If you do, you will always be able to revert back to a contact, and who said what when. What correspondence was involved etc. To say nothing about scheduling appointments, and being reminded of birthdays and other important events. Act is the backbone of my business and personal contact information. Invaluable and used every day. I have used over may revisions and Company changes. Sometimes the customer service is better than others. Presently the Customer Service is Excellent. If you are a first time user or considering starting to use it I would recommend you take a course on using it as many of the features are not apparent unless someone shows them to you. A great tool to keep track of what everyone on your team is doing and as they move on a record of what they did and who was involved. A great tool that I rely on daily. Happy to spread the word.

Nachteile

Many features that I never use, but see how others would. Don't like having to use MS Outlook for e-mail.

Would like to access completely by phone, but my database is too big.

Vorteile

I began using Act! 20+ years ago the draw for me was the ability to customize the product for my companies needs. I have run my company's database with this software from start up and I have made it work through the years. In the earlier days I was able to automate functionality to stay ahead of trends and have robust productivity far a head of my competitors. As the years have gone on and the product was sold and resold they have updated and brought general users more but have left lifelong users in the dust for profit.

Nachteile

Subscription services that cripple my ability to utilize the fully purchased/owned product. I feel that the company sold out for recurring subscriptions. I don't care that they want to go to subscription but I do care that I have my feet held to the fire because of it. Users like myself enabled their progress and continued success.

Vorteile

This product allows you to integrate the basic and most complicated processes within your business. I love the email link feature, any time I send an email to a client (who has their email in their account profile), the system automatically saves that email in the client profile. You don't have to search for it in your inbox, or click an extra button to push the details over to the profile, it all happens automatically. The icing on the cake, is now that it is in the client profile, other members of my team can see what emails I have communicated to client, and when they were sent. It helps to keep my team all on the same page. This is by far the best Client Database system I have ever used. AMAZING!

Nachteile

The biggest downside to ACT is there is not a built in funnel email system. You have to select the group or type of clients that you want to email, export that to another database and then send the communications from there. The system will still tag your emails as long as they are sent from your domain, but having to export the list an use an additional software or service to send the mass email notifications is a little frustrating. If they can fix this option, it would make my life a lot easier.

Vorteile

I understand the interface because I have used ACT daily for over 30 years.

Nachteile

ACT does almost everything poorly. It does not sync with multi-user unless you call support. You cannot move your data out of ACT onto a competitive product. They keep raising the price of support. I have tried all three different mass email programs they have offered over the years, but none of the mass email systems worked. The email system required support from ACT to make them work, and still a major problem. I have used ACT for over 30 years, have 10K contacts, and I cannot leave ACT. If you have not bought ACT, do not. If you are going to work on this everyday, pay the money and go with SalesForce.

Vorteile

Now it is on the cloud rather than desktop version we don't need to synchronise as this never worked properly anyway

Nachteile

they are removing useful features every year to the point it becomes a glorified database, it always has technical issues of some description. they fix one thing and break another.
It is very limited in what it can do, looks ok on the outside but when you come to use it you find that it is so limited it is difficult to make it work effectively.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

None it is a very good CRM for marketing purposes

Vorteile

What's not to love? It keeps my contacts names, numbers, addresses, emails, etc... sorted. I can mark/tag them for different groups, find them, note them, write them, sort them... I can schedule me calls, meetings, to-do's with alarms to remind me. I LOVE MY ACT!

Nachteile

The only reason for the 4 stars is because this software will do so much and I being age 60 and not growing up with computers all thru school... I am probably not doing one tenth of what I could be doing with ACT and yet it is still a LIFESAVER! Without ACT, I would NEVER be able to keep my "ACT" together... lol.
It makes me feel a little incompetent knowing there is SO MUCH MORE it could do for me if I knew how to do it.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

Organization and logic

Nachteile

Syncing with Outlook and Gmail can be difficult.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

I can track my customers and their email addresses.

Nachteile

The confusion with accessing customers.