Act! Reviews - Page 2

I like that I can still use a PC-based product that I control and provide security necessary to product our client and internal information. I like that my customized version fits my basic needs to manage contacts and periodically send email messages and letters.

I need ACT support to fix problems with email merge too often. The time required to send routine communications annually has increased at least 10 fold due to time needed to fix problems. Most of the problems seem to be keeping up with Microsoft.

We value our long-time users and love hearing from you! We are happy to hear that you like the benefits of Act! Premium Desktop, but are sorry to learn that you are experiencing issues with the email merge. We want to help as best we can. Please visit https://www.act.com/resources/contact/ or give us a call at 866-873-2006 to see how we can provide some assistance.

We have been using ACT for 19+ years. To make the switch to the cloud version just seemed logical. It has the basics features that we need and was simple to transfer over to the client.

ACT does not have all the bells and whistles that we would like such as power dialers and automatic reporting.

Thanks for letting us know, Tracy, that Act! Premium Cloud is meeting your CRM and marketing needs. We appreciate you taking the time to let us know.

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.

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.

We love hearing from our customers Sally, and appreciate you taking the time to let us know how Act! is helping your business. We understand that you found some limitations around reporting and wanted to be sure you had access to these digital resources to help with your customization needs. https://www.act.com/resources/ If there are additional features you'd like to see in Act!, we'd love to know and invite you to please submit a feature request by visiting this URL. https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/5833907456404e3d99cb5c440433f6a0 Thank you again for your feedback.

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

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

Hi David, thank you for taking the time to share how your business is using Act! -especially the cloud-based solution. We love hearing from our customers, so thanks again for sharing!

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.

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.

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.

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.

I like the fact that a team of 5 can share effectively in real time, I like the ease of changing layouts and adding fields, and with Seamless the ablity to easily prdcue high quality documenation. It's link to outlook and ODBC is good and it is a stable, which being at the core of our business is a good thing

There are many things I think we could do to be more productive but can't, and we do see fields being changed or lost "by themselves". The web version was a poor version of the Pro, and we haven't been able to make it available when offline, which is a frustration.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hi Nicole, Thanks for your feedback! You're correct that our main desktop product is only available for PC. Did you know we do offer a fully web-based solution, Act! Premium Cloud? This works great on PC and Mac, as well as keeping your data online on our hosted cloud servers. It sounds like your business could make good use of the features available via Act! Cloud - might be worth checking it out at act.com - we do offer a free trial too. We'll definitely be taking your feedback on board for future releases - especially what you've said around email syncing. We've got some major improvements planned in this area in the next release (20.1). Lastly, there should be no limit to how many contacts can be assigned to a company - if you're having issues adding more than 4, I'd definitely recommend contacting customer support, who'll be happy to help. If there's anything more we can do to help, please let us know! Thanks again, Jon, Act! Social Media Team

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.

What's not to like First of all Client set up is a breeze! Once entered all notes are time dated. To email your client their is an Icon click on it and it automatically opens up Outlook and fills out the email address. Send and email and it keeps a copy of the email you sent to them and or received from them time dated. It allows you to set have set groups of which you can email everyone in that group. For instance maybe you have people who use tank cars, people may use box cars or need certain products you can have send a blast just to those people with a simple click on the group or groups. Want to see the locations a client there is an ico click on that a google maps opens and you can do a satellite view. Suffice it to say it does everything but wash the dishes.

Nothing! The survey is asking for a min of 40 words to describe what I don't like ok its not free!

Thank you, Raymond! We especially love hearing from our long-time customers and enjoy learning how Act! has helped their businesses over the years. We'd love to learn more about your business if you'd like to share your Act! Success Story. It's easy - just paste this link into your browser to get started. Thanks again for sharing and we wish continued success to you! https://www.act.com/success-stories/

I used ACT! for nearly 20 years in my previous role and when I went freelance I really missed it but thought it was not affordable. I am now so busy I really needed to get organised and I was pleasantly surprised at how affordable it actually is. It only really needs to save me one hour a month to give me more than return on investment - and it did that on day 1!

I made a silly error uploading and couldn't figure out how to undo so I shall be calling on the onboarding team for help.

We are so happy to have you back, Claire, and thrilled to hear that Act! is already saving you time and helping you organize your business. We wish you the very best with your freelance business! How exciting!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thank you, Manuel, for your feedback. We appreciate you taking the time to let us know how Act! is working for you. We see that you had Microsoft 11 compatibility issues last fall, and according to our records, moved to Windows 10 to restore your database and functionality. We are sorry to hear you are still experiencing issues and hope that you'll reach back out to our Support team for further assistance at https://www.act.com/resources/contact/ or call 866-873-2006. In addition, we are happy to share the following Knowledgebase article published by Microsoft with more details about the issue and resolution. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/database-engine/database-file-operations/troubleshoot-os-4kb-disk-sector-size

The CRM is easy to use and one can learn how to use it very quickly. Act keeps up with the changing times and provides the tools that a sales person needs to optimize his/her performance. Introduction of Marketing Automation was an added bonus that provides a sales person with more power to find leads

The pricing has risen over the years to the point that I feel it is now on the high end of the spectrum. I probably utilize only 20 - 25% of all the ACT features; but I'm paying for a software program that can accomplish more than what I need. I started with the original ACT when it first came out (forgot how many years ago) and it had a very attractive price at that time.

Thank you, Ken, for your feedback. We are happy to hear that Act! is helping your business and that the Calendar and Notes features are especially useful to you. We are excited that you have begun using Act! Marketing Automation and wanted to share these resources to help you leverage its powerful capabilities to create landing pages, capture leads, and nurture prospects and customers. Please check them out at https://www.act.com/resources/act-marketing-automation/.

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!

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.

It's easy to set up and use. Support staff answer questions and show the user new things that varied from previous versions of the database.

Making changes to personalize the contact screens were a tad bit tricky at first. However, once I completed that process, everything else was a breeze.

We're happy to hear that Act! is helping you manage your client and vendor information, Debbie, and that you're enjoying the value of our full-featured software. Thank you so much for taking the time to leave us this review!

Main features are easy to use such as adding companies and contacts. Lots of training videos available.

Some features feel a bit clunky but this could be a system issue rather than the software itself.

Hi Matthew, It's great to hear that you're enjoying Act!'s combined CRM and marketing automation features and using it to manage your contacts and opportunities and easily segment them for email communications. We love hearing from our customers and greatly appreciate your feedback!

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.

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.

Thank you, Vincent, for taking the time to leave this review. We'd love to learn more about your business and highlight it on our Success Story webpage and social channels! If you'd like to share your Act! Success Story, it's easy - just paste this link into your browser to get started. We hope to hear from you! Thanks again for sharing and we wish continued success to you! https://www.act.com/success-stories/

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

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.

Kris, Thank you for letting us know about your issues with marketing automation- this is not the experience we strive to provide our customers. We hope you'll give our Support team another try. Please reach out to https://www.act.com/resources/contact/ or call 866-873-2006 so we can get a few more details, and provide some possible solutions.

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.

None that I can think of...over our old ACT versions.

We are a long time user of Act with 64000 contacts, and thought about an upgrade and tried the newest software. Connection to ACT did not work, called customer service which took DAYS to respond, and only with trivial solutions or told us out browsers were inadequate. We cannot use cloud based software, as many of our sales persons need to travel and out of internet on the road. We asked about purchasing a copy for local server use, and they STILL have not called back. Uses alot of memory and crashed the test computer a couple of times. I reviewed the posts, and many are favorable, but their usage is very different than ours. Most of the positives come from short time users who have no other experience. If you have alot of contacts, doubt if this will work for you.