Act! Reviews

I'm able to integrate with MS Outlook, and sync within my Ipad and Google phone. Your costumer support is awesome with it's followup and addressing and any issues I may have. Deserves more than 5 stars!

Software pricing is becoming an issue as less expensive models are out there that competes with Act. Need to consider reduction pricing for those loyal customers like myself since 2006. Needs to come up with a better less tedious way of merging contact duplicates.

I have pioneered the purchase of ACT! in my company. Back then, It offers a perpetual license per user which is great as you don't subject yourself to a monthly or annual subscription. I love the fact that ACT! marketing can be customised and very rare that it falls under the promotions tab of the email recipient.

ACT! can only be linked to a certain version of Outlook which i find not helpful. Not all the licenses we purchased were maximise as they find ACT! a work duplicate particularly on the finance side since only selected accounting software can be integrated in the ACT! system.

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!

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.

Ease of use. I have used it in the past so familiarity.

The remote app is not as user friendly as some I have seen but it works.

I loved ACT when I used to use it. It was by far the best CRM at the time.

Last time I used ACT and granted it was many years ago, it wasn't cloud based. At one point my computer crashed and I lost my entire ACT database that hadn't been backed up in the last few weeks. I was devastated and decided I had to switch to something that was in the cloud.

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.

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

With only minor exceptions, Act! has presented and behaved in the same way for years. Given that I have relied heavily on Act since about 1992, that is some track record, especially for software. In my experience it is;
Extremely powerful
Very user friendly (minimises costs of staff training, increases productivity and compliance)
Very reliable
Essential

It can be resource hungry so good networks and reasonable computing power needed
There can occasionally be niggles with the MS Outlook interface (though how much this is to do with Microsoft fiddling with interface parameters etc I can't say)

Very intuitive, and worked quickly. Unlike some other Cloud or Microsoft CRM solutions, there were no 'load times' when you switched to a different customer or different activity. It was highly customizable, and the import/export processes were intuitive and worked flawlessly.

Seemed harder to add new minor features we would like... However, we last used the software 2 years ago so it might not have been the most current version. Interface was cometically so so but worked well.

This software doesn't require a monthly charge (if you have the desktop version) It allows you to create customized reports and input more information then you possibly could need.

This software has several Cons, One of the biggest is that its not user friendly so much. it takes you a long time to figure out how to use functions. I had trouble when I fist started using it. Also, when I wanted up upload excel spreadsheets of client info into the CRM. I had to buy an "Add On" which I think should of been something included in the program.

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.

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.

There is absolutely nothing I like about this software.

Zero functionality. It can't pull any reports that are meaningful. When I think I can pull a report that is meaningful, I realize the data isn't even correct. It has almost no dynamic features; for instance, it can't update data by pulling it from another source; it has to be manually changed, which leads to errors. Also, Act! web premium only works if you have a really high quality internet connection. For example, we have 100MBPS internet; however, the speed is very inconsistent, which causes the Premium web version of Act! to constantly crash every time the internet slows down, while any normal web app would continue to load, or try to load, or just slow down. But Act! doesn't have that functionality; it just crashes, becomes unresponsive, and doesn't save any of the data you just input. When you restart your browser, it makes you sign in again. Also, almost no functionality is available on the web app; you can't delete contacts on the web version; you cannot import anything into the web version, and you can't manipulate any data. You can only input completely new data. It's literally awful.

Contacts don't link well with groups or 'companies.' If you have seven people working for the same company and that company moves offices. If you change the address to that company, you have to individually change those seven people who work there.

But the worst feature is the importing tool. You can't import in any 'advanced' way at all unless you pay for an importer tool, which you can't be sure will work for you. When talking with our third party Act! customer service person, I asked if I could try the import tool to make sure it did what I want before I bought it, or if I could have him try it for me to make sure it worked, and he said "No. There is no way to provide that service."

When asking a simple question like, "So your input tool didn't find the duplicate contacts and just imported 700 duplicates. Is there a way to delete the duplicates all at once? Because all I see is an option to delete the duplicates one by one?" they told me there was no way to do it but that they would charge me to have them delete them for me. And I was quoted at an over 50 hour project quote, for something that took me one minute to do. So I just restored my backup file and started over.

Also, I purchased a duplicate removal tool that was developed by a third party software company, and I thought it would work great, but it turns out that half of the contacts in the system had been uploaded with their full name as one fiedl and the other half with their first middle and last name as different fields. There is now way to differentiate this in ACT because it displays them the same way, so it merged all of the John's into one John contact. So again, I had to restore to a backed up database.

The Swiftpage integration is awful. The only way I am able to use Swiftpage to any success is to export every single email, name, and address in Act! into an Excel spreadsheet, remove any duplicates, sort by region or the way I want to set up groups to email blast in Swiftpage, go to the actual swiftpage6.com website and upload the spreadsheets into Swiftpage manually. The Swiftpage email marketing HTML editor is also pretty bad. You can write beautiful HTML to display a great email, but Swiftpage mutilates the code in ways no one could ever understand. I am a professional coder - javascript, html, css - and it takes me hours, sometimes days, to design a marketing email that displays correctly in any sort of email client. In fact, it doesn't even ever look great when it's done, even after all the hard work. I would highly recommend any other email marketing company other than Swiftpage.

I was on hold with a Swiftpage rep once for over three hours to find out why my email blast which was supposed to be sent by 10AM was still in the queue by 7pm. It actually didn't go out till almost midnight, and we had a 3% open rate, when we normally have a 15% open rate with other email marketing software.

Please, please please do not buy this.

With a database as important and large as mine, it's going to be extremely hard to switch to another software without major delays in service. The company has used it since 2002, and there is a lot of important data that needs to be imported into to a new system. It's going to cost a lot of money to do, and we will do it, but I just pray and beg that no one else ever has to be in the same situation that I am in if they don't have to be.

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.

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.

we inherited this software and while it has some good basic functions, apart from knowing how to use it I have nothing positive to say about it

Customer service is the WORST. I'm currently waiting for my rep to get back to me about an unresolved issue (it's been over 4 weeks since we were able to access our task lists). In the 4 weeks i have left numerouse messages and followed up with emails. As a total I received 1 email correspondence.
We have 3 new staff members that started within the last month and although trying to reach out numerous times regarding setting up profiles for these staff, we haven't been able to get a response.

ACT for web speed
we have a database of about 28000 contacts and are unable to use ACT for web as it is that slow that it has become unusable.

INTEGRATION
Everytime there is a server update all integrations stop working. We have tried to set up email syncing since early this year. All that "support" has to say that it has to be our PC set ups. Yet they can't tell us which settings need to be changed.

Act has a lot of the features more expensive CRM’s offer without sacrificing usability or features. It is feature rich and simple to use.

Act hasn’t had many changes in the last two years. I would like to see more growth for this product.

Elegant solution that works across a range of devices with possibilities for a range of integrations much more cost effective than the competition for small businesses

Not always well integrated with other platforms eg leadpages etc - needs an intermediary or requires support of an ACT consultant to implement many integrations.

It is so comprehensive and keeps awesome records in an easy to access manner.

Nothing. it does everything i need to eun my life and my business.

Flexibility to set ACT to support different operations in my business.

I heavily customise the fields.

One version is my HR system. It beats Sage 50 HR for me

Difficult question. It does what U require.

If I am being critical, it could do with faster search routines. Also reporting is a bit dated.