Act!

Pros: This is one of the most descent application you can find for CRM (Customer Relationship Management) category. Simple and easy to use. Exists of great tracking feature and employees who roams place to place while working can interconnect with the office premises and continue with their tasks very easily. Email functions are also very helpful for building customer base.

Cons: Even though thy provide good space for marketing, still feels like that this application could improve social media marketing to a next level. Also reporting section should be improved.

Overall: My company sales division, use this for their marketing and sales tasks. We have expanded our sales by 120% approximately last year and this was the system/application we used to carry our connectivity and operations. Which means, there is a huge impact from Act! for our success. Would recommend this to anybody without a hesitation. This is a fine product.

Pros: I have been using Act! for a short time (less than 6 months) but already appreciate it so much more than other similar programs. From targeted lists and unique triggers for automated responses, Act! has been a powerhouse for driving our customer engagement. I think that what I appreciate the most about Act! is the prospect identification feature. By targeting specific buyers, it alerts me to others who may have similar metrics as these buyers thereby increasing my marketing campaigns' reach.

Cons: I think that Act! is only missing a few features. Namely, a better phone-based system. I think it's great as far as being behind a computer, and can understand that some of the computer based features are missing, but if they placed more attention on their phone-based CRM going forward with future updates, that would solidify this program as a powerhouse CRM for me.

Pros: Act has been around forever, and a lot of companies still use it. It is very simple to navigate, even for beginners. As a CRM, it is very easy to enter the various fields. You are part of a sales force, and you download your data, and now you are ready to prospect and make your call, which you document in Act. Any contact, notes, tasks, are very easy to enter and populate. So it's like a digital assistant.

Cons: It could use more areas to document and populate. Act is not new technology, and the old is very basic, compared to salesforce and goldmine.

Overall: I have used Act as a pre call planner, the call, and the post call. So I know what to say or bring next visit.

Pros: Act! is a super helpful CRM for businesses just starting out, but I've found to grow you really need more integrations

Cons: The ability to grow and scale your practice is limited by having all your info in different places

Pros: Consistent interface through the years, reliable functionality and easy to resolve simple issues. Even in a small business, hosting the database on a consumer grade PC and operating system still provides a functional and fast connection. The ability to create an offline database that can then be synced with the master database is very useful for laptop users.

Finally in ACT 2018/2019, the interface between Outlook 365 (aka Outlook 2016) and ACT! is finally more reliable.

Cons: The time it takes to create a large offline database seems way to slow. Some troubleshooting issues require support from ACT!. I strongly recommend a support plan with ACT!

Overall: Functional software for contact and opportunity management that has been in use for over 20 years with a consistent interface. All contact management software requires a learning curve to effectively use the software. My consulting clients do not use the marketing component of ACT, so those features have not been evaluated as of yet. ACT has gone through a number of owners, and the current owners seem to be putting in the effort to keep pace with Microsoft Outlook. Quickbooks integration could still be better though, but cooridnating with third party vendors will always be a challenge.

Pros: Effectively kept all information secure.

Cons: Very expensive, upgrades at an additional cost.

Overall: Overly thorough.

Pros: I have used this software a few times and feel it is very basic.

Cons: I feel it is possibly a bit outdated. This might also be that I was using an older version.

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

Recommendations to others considering the product

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Pros: I liked that it functioned as a CRM and I was able to keep track of tasks.

Cons: It has a terrible user interface and is not user friendly.

Overall: I do not like using this CRM as it is old and outdated compared to other CRM's

Pros: The only real pro for this software was at the time, it was super convenient for combing client and prospect data in an easy to use database.

Cons: Was quickly replaced by other free solutions

Constant harassment from rep about upgrading each year to the newest version

Client with an older version was rendered inoperable due to a license of ACT expiring.

Customer support is slow to escalate issues.

Overall: At the time it was useful for our customer database for warehouse shipping, however the cost, frustration of customer support (any database error meant you had to sit and waste time with level 1 tech who just asked to restart the server)