ACT!
ACT! CRM software review:
ACT! CRM is designed with small businesses and sales teams in mind. For 25 years this CRM has been helping companies streamline their sales processes and manage data in one organized place. As your business’s command center, ACT! allows you to access relevant relationship details and connects to business-critical services and productivity tools. Its ease of use and customizability makes it a great CRM option.
ACT! 2013 has basic marketing automation capabilities to help your business create compelling campaigns and track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. This contact management software is a clean-cut solution offering simple navigation and customized features and tools to facilitate better business function.
ACT! gives your company the functionality of a premier customer management solution without the big price tag. This software comes in on premise and on demand deployment options. ACT! Cloud gives your team on-demand access to your CRM system with the premium edition while ACT! On-Premises: ACT! Pro and ACT! premium are on-premise solutions. ACT! is also available on any internet connected devices, allowing your company the flexibility to be as mobile as you need.
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ACT! CRM has been an ongoing battle for our company. There are certain features within ACT! that our sales staff do not find “easy” to use, so they opt to not use it altogether. They don’t like that fact that there are certain fields that must be filled out or it keeps them from submitting an entry, it is easy to duplicate contacts which cause our data base to be cluttered with the same contact with various information. When you go to delete duplicates (using a feature ACT! provides), you end up deleting or merging the wrong contacts. We had a case when we were trying to delete duplicates and it ended up deleting over 1,400 contacts and broke syncing mechanisms for our database to server. Causing us a giant hassle with time and money to get it fixed.
When you go to use Groups, which we use to send our email blasts, it’s always a hit or miss. In the group feature you are able to set up certain criteria in order to select contacts based off your contacts within the database. It’s never right, and you always have to go back and manually add or take people out of the list. Part of this is due to the lack of information that our salesmen “forget” to enter, I’ll admit. However my first criteria I always enter first is that contact contains an email address, and it never fails to select contacts that do not have an email listed. Another issue we have with ACT is that we have it set up that each salesmen contacts are “private” so no other salesmen can see them, besides the sales manager and the administrator. That doesn’t always work. We have all the sales accounts set to the same settings, and there are a few that have their contacts show up in other peoples databases, for no apparent reason.
All in all, I would not recommend ACT! CRM. The consensus within our company is that hindsight is 20/20, and when the decision was made long ago, they wish they had opted for the other CRM they were looking at, but decided on ACT! due to budgetary reasons.
Thanks for your honest review Emily - what other CRM were you looking at when you decided to choose ACT! for financial reasons?
ACT is a powerful tool for organizations to manage and touch their contacts regularly. As an IT services professional that needs to recommend software to a variety of different organizations with different requirements in regards to contacting prospects or customers, I don't hesitate to look to ACT! as a top recommendation. It is a versatile platform that integrates nicely, especially with people who rely on Outlook for email/calendars/contacts. Sage also provides excellent support when we run into difficulties either with technical issues or figuring out how to perform specific features within the application. If I had to criticize one thing about ACT, it would be that it takes some training to figure out. However, when you are dealing with a fully featured product that is meant to work in a variety of environments it is reasonable to expect some training.
I will continue to recommend ACT moving forward and always consider it a top choice when looking for a CRM solution.
Once really understanding the ins and outs of this program I love it. It is very easy to customize it to your companies needs. I love that it is compatible with smart phones/pads so we can use it everywhere. I've always gotten really great customer support and it is easy to train new employees how to use it.
Submit your review | |
ACT! CRM has been an ongoing battle for our company. There are certain features within ACT! that our sales staff do not find “easy” to use, so they opt to not use it altogether. They don’t like that fact that there are certain fields that must be filled out or it keeps them from submitting an entry, it is easy to duplicate contacts which cause our data base to be cluttered with the same contact with various information. When you go to delete duplicates (using a feature ACT! provides), you end up deleting or merging the wrong contacts. We had a case when we were trying to delete duplicates and it ended up deleting over 1,400 contacts and broke syncing mechanisms for our database to server. Causing us a giant hassle with time and money to get it fixed.
When you go to use Groups, which we use to send our email blasts, it’s always a hit or miss. In the group feature you are able to set up certain criteria in order to select contacts based off your contacts within the database. It’s never right, and you always have to go back and manually add or take people out of the list. Part of this is due to the lack of information that our salesmen “forget” to enter, I’ll admit. However my first criteria I always enter first is that contact contains an email address, and it never fails to select contacts that do not have an email listed. Another issue we have with ACT is that we have it set up that each salesmen contacts are “private” so no other salesmen can see them, besides the sales manager and the administrator. That doesn’t always work. We have all the sales accounts set to the same settings, and there are a few that have their contacts show up in other peoples databases, for no apparent reason.
All in all, I would not recommend ACT! CRM. The consensus within our company is that hindsight is 20/20, and when the decision was made long ago, they wish they had opted for the other CRM they were looking at, but decided on ACT! due to budgetary reasons.
Thanks for your honest review Emily - what other CRM were you looking at when you decided to choose ACT! for financial reasons?
ACT is a powerful tool for organizations to manage and touch their contacts regularly. As an IT services professional that needs to recommend software to a variety of different organizations with different requirements in regards to contacting prospects or customers, I don't hesitate to look to ACT! as a top recommendation. It is a versatile platform that integrates nicely, especially with people who rely on Outlook for email/calendars/contacts. Sage also provides excellent support when we run into difficulties either with technical issues or figuring out how to perform specific features within the application. If I had to criticize one thing about ACT, it would be that it takes some training to figure out. However, when you are dealing with a fully featured product that is meant to work in a variety of environments it is reasonable to expect some training.
I will continue to recommend ACT moving forward and always consider it a top choice when looking for a CRM solution.
Once really understanding the ins and outs of this program I love it. It is very easy to customize it to your companies needs. I love that it is compatible with smart phones/pads so we can use it everywhere. I've always gotten really great customer support and it is easy to train new employees how to use it.
