Act! reviews

Magical Act !

Opmerkingen: My experience with Act has been wonderful. This software is a real gift, a real treat. It's so fantastic how it allows me to automate my business. Very easy to use, I can easily retrieve information on customers; I also have a history of my mails, calls and letters.

Pluspunten:

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!

Minpunten:

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

Basic CRM that does the job

Pluspunten:

ACT is easy to use and does what a CRM is supposed to do: manage contacts and contact information. It is easy to create contacts, companies, links and search for them. It can be used offline which makes it extremely convenient when there is no internet access (eg: business trips). The DB will synchronize when you are back online. Another thing is that it is an off the shelf product: it does not require any development to configure.

Minpunten:

The software lacks customizable reports and dashboard. It is extremely complicated to setup a good dashboard with the reports that you need. There is not much options or flexibility, and the display does not always end up being right (missing items). So it is not the best for sales/opportunities management.

Easy tool

Opmerkingen: Only had the change to use free trial, integrated with Sage 360 as it is owned by Sage. Created a few marketing automation and went live as well, got great results, it had potential. Used its app also to track progress and results.

Pluspunten:

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.

Minpunten:

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

ACT has many features, but most of them are cumbersome and lacking full functionality.

Pluspunten:

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.

Minpunten:

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.

Amazing Software that has help me accelerate my business

Opmerkingen: Overall, I have been able to track and provide my sales and marketing success to my owners. It's important to measure your success and Act! has made it simple and easy to use.

Pluspunten:

I enjoy having task and opportunity options. It makes me organized and I can manage my time. I love marketing automation as it's difficult to reach out to hundreds of contacts at a time.

Minpunten:

I would like to change the colors of the program. The blue and white are a little too overwhelming for my eyes. I would like "Dark Mode" if that would be possible.

Act and your need for a CRM

Opmerkingen: Without the introduction of a CRM, i doubt we would have had the client retention we have been lucky to have, we had trialed other CRM's, from free online to high cost ones like Goldmine - they all do much the same but our need to a specific way of accessing and manipulating our data left us with Act as the only real option. One option was to have a bespoke system but costs in the region of £100,000 and constant support didnt make much business sense at the time and after seeing similar projects fail at rival companies we think the route we took has been justified

Pluspunten:

Having the ability to scale requirements has helped the business grow without huge outlay. Has the capability to use high end hardware and now has a Cloud based solution so removing the need for costly onsite equipment if required

Minpunten:

As usual costs, the license model has change from perpetual to the per user per year, the Cloud based variant is expensive but comparable to others. The need for a 3rd party module to fully use the software for our needs has increased usability but at a cost, would of been nice to include in subscription

ACT CRM, Great Starter CRM.

Opmerkingen: For many years that I did use act I really enjoyed it was a great tool getting used to working with it was very easy for me. we did a lot of customization to the dashboard added some imagery additional fields it was really awesome. We didn't get to the point to using their marketing campaign products but the email templates were really awesome really awesome

Pluspunten:

I really liked the contact management history management email integration and tracking grouping of contacts opportunity groups add opportunity ratings.

Minpunten:

Act is a really great entry level CRM it has some functionality's third party capabilities other products you can purchase from the store but it just doesn't have what it takes to get you over the hill when you get a little bit larger

Good As A Contact Manager, Not As A 2020 CRM

Opmerkingen: ACT! was very helpful in moving our business forward at a time where we mainly needed to focus on contact management. Now that I need a true CRM, there are better alternatives for us.

Pluspunten:

I used ACT daily for years. It works well as a contact manager and can help track email conversions through an Outlook plugin.

Minpunten:

The program lacks the advanced functionality you would expect with a modern day customer relationship management software. The design is also extremely dated.

Great product with room for improvement

Opmerkingen: I have been using Act for almost 10 years. It's a quality product for the price point. Good customer service, highly responsive.

Pluspunten:

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

Minpunten:

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.

Act and old and reliable friend.

Opmerkingen: I have looked at other CRM packages and find they offer no great benefits.

Pluspunten:

It is easy to understand and use. You can add fields on any screen and it's user friendly.

Minpunten:

Integration with exchange is unreliable. Support is spotty at best.

How act is helping me working at 74 as a sales man

Opmerkingen: I have been using ACT's since 1999 and this year I turned 74 and I'm still selling with the very best of them. I sell power supplies to industry and without ACT there is no way I could compete in the world of sales today without ACT, I put everything and anything that helps me sell more in a very competitive field including emails, quotes, power supply spec, and notes. I see so many people who will not invest in this program or database if they did their sales would be much higher nobody can remember everything but ACT does. In all the years I have used at never a problem of any kind I do keep it on three computers as the backup just in case there's a crash of one of my computers. I backup my database 2 to 3 times a week making sure I have everything when I need it. The thing I like most about ACT when I go to sales meetings I have all my information right in front of me on my laptop and so many people don't. So when I am questioned about any customer I can look in my notes and have the answers I need, without ACT my sales numbers would be much lower.
Thanks ACT

Pluspunten:

Without ACT I could not compete as well as I do in the sales world for it is changing every day. I need ACT to help track my customers my orders my RFQ's and so many other things without it I wouldn't have a job today. I see so many salespeople who won't invest in ACT who sales numbers could be so much better I tell them about ACT but they don't seem to want to invest in their future and their future sales that could be so much better.

Minpunten:

I cannot find one thing wrong with ACT I have been using it approximately 20 years and never had a problem I cannot say this about other database programs I have had to use when I worked for other companies. Some of them were super complicated took hours of work just to get your data in whereas using ACT it was a breeze putting data in and saving data of all kinds.

Long Time User

Opmerkingen: Because we have at least 3 people involved in one transaction, the relationship tab helps us tie them together to the transaction. We can toggle back and forth easily without having to search another name. It's quick and efficient. With our customized fields, we can easily see years of history for a client on one page. We have been frustrated over the years by the number of crashes and freezes.Occasionally an import will not import correctly and the data in put into the wrong fields. The support help and support page of the marketing automation is very poor and lacking in depth training on creating/sending eblasts. There are is no advanced level training for the eblasts and drip marketing.

Pluspunten:

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.

Minpunten:

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.

Act! through the years

Opmerkingen: I love Act!, the functionality, the ability to customize, detailed reports. I run my single jobs, AR, AP, reporting, generate documents, calendar, follow up, email all through Act! and have micro control of every document and report. I have several users and the addons are endless.

Pluspunten:

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.

Minpunten:

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.

ACT is a great software product that allows you to integrate your database and track your clients

Opmerkingen: ACT is worth the price and worth the training to get educated on it. Unfortunately you need to spend some time figuring out the details, but once you do, it is off to the races and you will love the system every day. It really is a great product.

Pluspunten:

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!

Minpunten:

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.

Long time user

Opmerkingen: I use ACT 10 hours a day, but it is clunky.

Pluspunten:

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

Minpunten:

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.

Avoid this software!!

Opmerkingen: Support is brilliant, product is awful, the developers are changing features all the time, it has many incompatibility issues with outlook and web browsers, in all the time we have had it we have had to rely heavily on support to fix things every single year. I don't know why I have stuck with it for so long.
Now they have done an update, removed the option to individually record email history so you have to record nothing or record everything coming in and out of your emails which clearly is not desirable!
the task box is small and basic which is how we track work in progress, the pop up calendar only pops up some of the calendar so you have to manually expand it to see the whole month.
when you update tasks and click ok to save it doesn't always save your information so when you go back into your task everything you have just updated isn't there, intermittent issues like this all the time.

Pluspunten:

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

Minpunten:

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.

Super Disappointed

Pluspunten:

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

Minpunten:

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.

2021 ACT v22 Review

Opmerkingen: Overall, from 1991 up until summer 2020, has been pretty seamless using ACT and upgrading from previous versions to current versions. The last v22.0 upgrade I installed, gave me the impression that someone at ACT was more concerned about getting their bonus and 'rushing' out this new version, than making sure an 'error free' product was released. This combined with the elimination of service contracts, gives the impression they're going to "milk the cow" and end up closing up the business and leaving customers stranded.

Pluspunten:

Familiar as I have been using ACT since 1991, starting with v2.0 and now have v22.1.

Minpunten:

ACT worked 'great' up to and including v21. Since the release of v22, I get ACT "NOT RESPONDING" messages 6-8x per day and need to completely reboot my laptop. Also with v22, I have randomly and periodically had (2x) my template for Contacts changed/rearranged. This combined with the elimination of service contracts, makes using ACT and potentially upgrading to the next version of ACT "unattractive".

Act is great for marketing

Opmerkingen: Our marketing team is virtual and located all over the US. We use Act for all our marketing accounts. Our administration uses Act for business development as well as our marketing team for each and every campaign.

Pluspunten:

We have been using Act for 18 years. It's a nice product with as many bells and whistles thats needed for a CRM. Its easy to implement and set up databases. It has the necessary features for analytics and reporting for clients.We plan to upgrade to an Act cloud version soon.

Minpunten:

The only feature I would like to see added would be an internal voip so that you could hit the call button and Act would dial automatically.

Best featured and Best value CRM for Small business

Opmerkingen: Firstly, I'm an Act! Certified Consultant and I sell and provide services around Act! and have done so since 2001. Although I'm not a client, I have continually had to make an assessment about whether Act! is the right product for our prospective and existing clients. My personal experience is that there is no single software product that is suitable for every business. If you are a big enterprise, Act! isn't the product you are going to invest in. For small business though it should be at the top of your list to review. Act! has a greater depth and depth of functionality for the price of any CRM software in the market for the small business users. If there was something that were better I'd be inclined to be offering it to our clients. Act! has been around for nearly 30 years and the many things that you are likely to want to be able to do, Act! just does. Many of the small, simple, day to day tasks will be made easier by your use of Act!. Act! is a product that you will hear many loyal and satisfied clients say that they Love and that they can't do without. Act! is easy to use and it's highly configurable. It excels in a MS Windows environment, so if you are running a server with some desktops and laptops it's an ideal solution. It will run faster than any cloud based solution. Act! comes with both a Windows and Web based access. You could have some using it on their desktop in the office, and others using it via the web browser. The Web version doesn't completely match the windows version for functionality, but the gap is closing. With Act! you can deploy it on your own server so you own and control your data. You can still have the advantage of a web based login but know that your database is in an environment you control. Act! has a range of excellent third party add-ons that en-rich it's functionality and with a new API in the latest 18.1 version there will be many more integrations between Act! and other web based applications. If I were to simplfy where I see Act! in the market it would be to say it sits in the middle of the basic cloud offerings like Pipedrive, Insightly, Highrise etc. and the full blown CRM's from Saleforce, SugarCRM and Microsoft. If you are an established business that is looking for a best in class CRM to work on your MS Windows platform and still provide good mobile and web browser based access then Act! is ideal.

"Get Your Act Together"

Opmerkingen: I am keeping my Insurance and Retirement Planning business running with it and I believe I first started using ACT in 1994. The basic functions that I use it for are easy to learn and use. I sure wish I would have had the chance to take courses on ACT, Excel, etc... while in college but when I graduated in 1979 there were no such things.

Pluspunten:

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!

Minpunten:

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.

Think carefully before buying ACT!

Opmerkingen: Our overall experience with ACT! is not good, so after 17 + years I made the decision to switch to another CRM when we upgraded our computers.
Our IT Consultant summarised it beautifully when he was moving programs and files from the existing hardware to new hardware and said "Please tell me you don't want me to move ACT! as well". He never liked it either
The issue with email marketing and emails was long standing and in the end we gave up, without being even close to a solution.
For a small business, it became too complex and non-user friendly, especially as other competitors with more features, better service and a more user-friendly 'current' CRM product entered the market.
Plus, to add insult to injury, Customer Service has deteriorated over the past few years.

Pluspunten:

When we first bought ACT! around 17 years ago we loved it. We were all happy with what it could do to automate the office and with client/lead management.

Minpunten:

Email marketing and email functionality - or lack of - with Outlook. Only being able to attach one document file to a history note has also caused much frustration.

Good for small business needs

Opmerkingen: Been using it for 15 years. Good overall,

Pluspunten:

Highly customizable fields. At each upgrade, all my changes are carried forward without me needing to do anything. Solid follow-up system.

Minpunten:

My only complaint is the size of the application on the screen. The settings that I use on the screen work for all my other programs. This displays just a bit smaller than I would like. Haven't found a way to correct.

THe company has been using it for at least 10 years

Opmerkingen: THere are a lot better CRM's out there figure out what you are using it for and what you need and start shopping I could suggest a few but to me they are a bit industry specific.

Pluspunten:

seems very simple and we had a long standing relationship with ACT with the in house CRM. So we had a lot of our contacts already on board and it does keep track of contacts.

Minpunten:

When I came on board about 3 months ago I suggested going to the cloud the idea was well recieved and I contacted act. We intially had some issues uploading the information some of which I will admit was my own fault. when I did the software lagged extremely bad. I contacted the company spent almost 4 hours o the phone (mostly on hold) the first time and then didnt get a call back untill about 9:30 that night. Then the trial was running out with out the issue being resolved I asked them to extend it while we tried to fix the issue they told me I had to buy it and then they would be able to fix it....

Act! CRM gives our company what it needs . Ease of use which boosts our team's productivity output

Opmerkingen: We are happy to upgrade to ACT CRM for their cloud based services, for Act's collection as well as consolidation of our sales data for marketing use and for new business acquisition . Act has also become
an off and online supplemental data base for our company.

Pluspunten:

We loved Act's flexibility and ease of use as each of our team members were able to use Act with their mobile devices and phones. Our team members reported that Act's updating process is quick, painless, and automated. In addition , their user interface was quite intuitive and made for generation of highly configurable reports in a timely manner .

Minpunten:

We have found Act to be a solid and multi faceted CRM. However , we would love more tutorials on importing contacts for business use and referral. By importing we would value some kind of scan utility feature for use with cell phones and tablets. That said , once a client enters contact information , Act will make a connection and provide information regarding parent companies or further supplemental data. This feature proves extremely useful.