Act! Reviews

"ACT experience"

Comments: Overall I think it is a very good program. I have had ACT since 2001. My issues tend to be more technical and ACT's non compatibility issues with Windows , as Windows keeps changing. I also know that I have not used much of the program. I will be getting an update and hope to be able to get better training on the whole program.

Pros: Ease of inputting and finding any client or prospect, When I can do a mail merge it is great,

Cons: Does not work properly with Windows. Contracts terminate to soon. Have never been able to use it with Outlook

"Great for a general database"

Comments: Act! is definitely an easy way to keep and organize all of my contacts. I've had a positive experience with customer service as well.

Pros: I use Act! as a database for my publicity and influencer contacts. It allows me to make various lists that I can download and use offline.

Cons: It is difficult to update large batches of contacts without starting over again or updating contact by contact. I wish that I could eliminate fields that I won't use. Searching has to be precise.

"This is a great place to start"

Pros: If you're new to using a CRM or want to keep things very simple, this system can't be beat for the money. It does all the basics with ease.

Cons: If you want to dig deeper and do email campaigns or capture custom information, this isn't the best system to use. When my company stopped supporting it, I began to have a lot of problems operating the system, and the ACT support team was not very helpful. I spent hours trying to use the system and then had to give us and switch to another one. This happened right after I renewed for another year, and they did not want to refund me.

"I am lost with ACT!"

Comments: I work in sales and need a concise way to keep track of people I contact. ACT provides the perfect vehicle where I can keep track of notes, histories and upcoming tasks. I can also reach out to my contacts using ACT features. I find it much more robust that other contact databases. I would not be successful without ACT!

Pros: It always saves without having to be told to save. It is so easy to add information to.

Cons: It is not easy to customize the user fields.

"I live on ACT"

Comments: I use this daily to keep business and personal information. I use this for mailing as well as e-mail to keep in touch with my clients as well as reaching out to relative and family friends. I live on ACT. Their customer support is excellent. I have been a user since 1999.

Pros: Updates give me more feature functionality. And I can easily find and add information on my contacts.

Cons: Right now I have the Premium Edition - I was unable to work off site. I plan to upgrade to the cloud edition which will allow me to work on site.

"Great software easy to use."

Comments: A great support team.

Pros: All the features and the ease of using them. The daily , monthly, weekly calendar help me keep completely organized. Helps me to stay in contact with my customers on time. This program also allows me to have controll of my schedule and keeps me organized.

Cons: Have had a little trouble with using the email feature but with a little practice seems to do the job.
Setting up groups was also a little challenging at first but practice makes perfect.

"I Recommend ACT to any of my clients looking for a CRM system"

Comments: Tangent Strategies is a selling education and support company. We have used ACT for over a decade. It keeps track of every customer and prospect we have and every communication we've had with them. We schedule activities, telephone calls and meetings on ACT. ACT reminds us when it is time to reach out to our prospects again and never lets us forget the meetings we've scheduled with our customers. These reminders have been a god-send ... when we might have otherwise forgotten an important meeting during our crazy busy days. ACT is a valued member of our selling instruction and selling support team.

Pros: Ease of use.

Cons: Nothing I can think of.

"Act now! Get Act!"

Comments: Almost entirely flawless, Act! Premium is a sound investment that is a must for any business that works with large groups of clients. The organization Act! provides makes life so much easier.

Pros: The company I worked at previously used Act! to maintain data on all of our clients. It keeps track of everything, from names and emails to previous communications and future prospects (as you record them). It's so much easier than creating and maintaining paper records, which can easily become lost. With its syncing capabilities, Act! can be accessed from any of your computers, which came in handy during the odd weekend work emergency came up.

Cons: The 4 GB cloud limit on Act! Premium was less than I would have liked, but we dealt with it.

"I have used this software sice ACT4"

Comments: Its a Like hate relationship. I use to call it LOVE hate. Its just a LIKE now.

Pros: The heritage base of this software is amazing. Its creators designed it to easily collect contact info was and is still unmatched. They thought of everything 20 years ago. They loved developing this software.
And Then ???

Cons: Every company that has owned ACT since Act 6 has treated it like an unwanted child. There is no pride attached to it. If it crashes support will get you and running. But if you run into a glitch in forms or something, your going to have to sail that ocean all alone

"Act! Premium Review"

Comments: I believe, since I use it every day, the basic use is fairly easy. I just upgraded to the new ACT!, and because of the folks they have in technical assistance, it was easy, but time-consuming, because I had all of my data stored on a Western Digital separate hard drive. I am a salesman, not a software genius. Since I have been using ACT! for over 30 years, I haven't found anything better.

Pros: It keeps all of my contact information about my clients in one program.

Cons: I know ACT! has many videos to watch about how to working with its amazing abilities. On a scale of 1 - 10,
I would rate every piece of software help a 10-- Meaning very difficult.
I'm sure that there are others who might find the help programs helpful.

"Awful experience with Act!"

Pros: There is absolutely nothing I like about this software.

Cons: 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.

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

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

"Great until you need support"

Comments: You need to put more Tech support people that know what they're doing to help those that have had this software for over 8 years!!!!! It's such a pain to get through to you for help.

Pros: Ease of storing, using databases once the horrific install and debugging is done. I really don't have anything else to say about the product.

Cons: Terrible, terrible customer support. No one answers the Tech Support line ever. If you call Sales, they give you 20 excuses as to why no one can help you. You might get an email from Tech Support telling you to do it yourself via links. Bottom line, sales people are great just don't look for anyone to help with debugging. The upgrades are often and every time you do an upgrade, you MUST contact Tech support because there are constant bugs

"Great Technical Support"

Comments: Allows our salesperson to keep detailed notes on phone calls and customers of over 20 years. She loves using the software and relies on it every day. She has never lost any of her data in all of the years of upgrades.

Pros: My user had an older version of ACT! that she had been using on her laptop that was not compatible with the latest version. The support team was able to take a back up of her database and upgrade it to the current version free of charge and without any hassle. Happy User=Happy IT support team.

Cons: Hard pressed to find anything that I didn't like about the software. It has been a trusted application by one of our top salespeople since the early 90's. She has maintained her database of clients and partners through several upgrades and has always been satisfied.

"Best Softwear that has Total Customization to Suit Your Needs!"

Comments: Easy & quick access to all my contacts. Save a lot of time! The people that put this together thought of everything. Buy this program, you won't be sorry!

Pros: I love that I can customize the colors, font size, page layout, tabs and everything else! I have been using ACT for at least 25 years and think it has everything anyone would need, regardless of profession. It is easy to work with once you get to know some basics. You can make different templates that enable you to have different views and show different information. So many features! It works well with WORD and I understand it can be used with G-mail. Best use is with Microsoft Outlook.

Cons: I don't like the change you made for the left side of template. It is dark gray and I don't know how to change that color!

"Fits my business well"

Comments: Does what I need and what I expected when I purchased it.

Pros: 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

Cons: 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.

"Poor Customer Service"

Pros: The only reason I use this software is that I have used it for 25+ years, too embedded to change

Cons: The Company, the Pricing and mostly the Customer Service. How crazy is I have to pay extra to speak to someone in the US that speaks English. Appalling. The response time is poor. I requested a password change via email as it is set up to do because it would not take mine; never got the reset password email. I called the sales number thinking they would at least ANSWER the phone. He told me there was an issue with the reset email and customer service (which I pay an extra $480.00 a year for) can help... on hold too long, left a message for a call back.... waiting..... Years ago ACT was amazing, since the transitions it has become progressively worse. The Product itself is good, the sales people are nice. That is it. I do wish I had the time to research options and change, perhaps in 2021.

"Act Review"

Comments: Sometimes the amount of data is confusing because there are so many programs to monitor. I would find it easier if there was a program attached the file explaining usage without having to call tech support.

Pros: I can track my customers and their email addresses.

Cons: The confusion with accessing customers.

"Using ACT!"

Comments: I have been using the program for 15 years. I like that when I last upgraded I did not have to learn everything over again! Microsoft does this and I don't care for it. I use mostly the contact database. However, I expect to purchase another copy of the program because of a new contract that will have extensive telemarketing and reporting.

Pros: Easy to use

Cons: Some of the features I will never use and some of the features take some time to learn how to use.

""Get Your Act Together""

Comments: 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.

Pros: 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!

Cons: 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.

"e-marketing, marketing automation"

Comments: I would pay twice if I will be able to go to previous abilities that ACT has

Pros: Act itself is as a good database software. Compering to previous version synchronized with Swift Page it has a better platform to create a template. There are other things you improve but for our small company we do not use them (like several times of sending same e-mail to one customer)

Cons: In Marketing Automation:
- you can not add and SAVE our data base fields in the template
- you can not send an e-mail from the template to one person (only to the group)
- you can not sent an e-mail to lookup (every time you must create the group from lookup)
- may e-mails is getting lost (in our 2 campaigns about 20% e-mails were not delivered)
In e-marketing
- you can not add and SAVE our data base fields in the template
******
In your previous version of ACT I was able to add fields from my database SAVE them in the template and send them to lookup without a need to create the group.
******
And your customer service ??? I believe you can do better work.
For example - I wrote an e-mail to you about month ago - with totally no answers from you.

"I may be prejudiced but I love this product"

Comments: I have used Act personally and for my business almost since its inception. Full disclosure: I have written 7 books on the product as well as the training videos for lynda.com/LinkedIn. I also do consulting work for several other CRM products and wrote a book on SugarCRM. For the money, you can't beat Act. Act has all the power of the "bigger" players without the expensive price point. As newer features are added the existing ones remain relatively stable so that an existing user can upgrade without being hit by a huge learning curve. That said, new users of ANY software product, and specifically CRM software, need to realize that training is essential if they want to unleash the full power of Act. And, like with any other software, support and training is not free - especially if your Act version is several years old. Try calling Microsoft the next time you need help with a spreadsheet or can't get Outlook to send your email and you will see exactly what I mean. However, all Act Premium subscriptions do include free technical support. I urge readers to take some of the reviews with a grain of salt. For example, Act is absolutely the easiest product out there when it comes to a mail merge. Try doing this in Salesforce and compare the number of keystrokes it takes to complete a merge. Another reviewer complains that you can't merge to over "50 contacts;" that restriction is meant to keep you spam-compliant and can easily be overcome by using the built in Act E-marketing Tool. Another reviewer complained that it took "days" to download the software; again, this is simply not the norm and one has to wonder what kind of security settings might have been blocking the ability to download software.

Pros: Perfect fit for mid-sized businesses. Great price point. Only truly hybrid solution that allows you to use Act both on your desktop and in a hosted environment.

"Long Time User"

Comments: 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.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

"22 year plus customer Sage / Act"

Comments: Years ago Act software helped me build a tremendous mortgage business. Out of that experience, I am reaching out to offer some effective criticism to enhance your product. Good luck! Feel free to contact me anytime.

Pros: I was probably one of the first purchasers of Act. It is a great program that needs a company to put some serious thought behind making it work better. After shopping several other CRM software's I still think it is above the rest in both user friendly and functionality. You price for the product is more than fair (in fact, I think low) but the software runs like it is somebody's part time job.

Cons: Customer service is the worst. The guys in India are great and I have nothing bad to say about them but is there some reason I need to sit on a phone 45 minutes waiting to speak to the representative? Again I think Act could be the CRM leader but I don't see much improvement over the past few years. The principles of this company have sat back and let opportunities walk by not focusing on the customers needs. With all the apps and technologies available Act should have more to offer.When I purchase a product I do not expect to have to spend hours chasing down my answers through videos.

"Love the ease of use for both entering data and retrieving info"

Comments: I use it to track my clients and prospects and I can tell anyone the last time I made contact, what that was - letter, Email, Phone Call, etc. and it allows me to connect important info to any of my clients, prospects, friends and family.

Pros: The fact that I was able to use the product immediately with no instruction was a great pro. Entering data and retrieving info about a client is easy, and building history of calls, Email messages, letters in a record is great.

Cons: I am not happy with support as all they do is provide a fix when there is a problem, but not direction in how to build reports or use other functionality. I have had to fix the same problem with direction from their service group several times. If I ask for help with reports they tell me I need to find a consultant for that.