Likelihood to Recommend Swiftpage ACT! would be well suited if you are using a desktop computing environment. ACT! is an old product and they were on the desktop for many years (and still are). Also, ACT! would also be well suited if you are not as concerned about implementing a CRM product that might require a little more training (e.g. if you had employees/salespeople that needed to be trained). Also, ACT! seems to be more generic than some of the industry focused products you see nowadays. For example, MethodCRM works well with non-profits that are on the cloud.
Read full review Excellent software to increase sales and follow up with existing and new customers. Email and SMS handling are really easy for the sales team, managing leads is really great, and Close merges duplicate leads to help our Data Leads avoid repetitive and unnecessary calls. As mentioned in some comments before, must improve in reports, Close is not appropriate to handle or track agents' hours making it necessary to implement additional software to cover this area.
Read full review Pros Integrated Email Marketing: For a small business, you can have a strong method to handle email marketing in an integrated non-disparate solution. Tailoring: There are no limits on what data you can store in the system and the ease of making changes can be done by a nontechnical person. User Interface: The tool is easy to get around in both the desktop (fat client) and (webclient) which both are quite similar in functionality. Integration: The tool integrates with Word, Excel, and Outlook nicely. And, it integrates with Google Mail and Contacts. There is a nice selection of third party tools available for various needs like AddressGrabber which allows for easy input of contacts from various sources such as email signatures, webpages, etc. Templates: I have enjoyed being able to store tons of various templates for letters which we use over and over for various communications like sales proposals, quotes, and nudging clients along the funnel and sales process. Automation: SwiftPage ACT! has a small business automation engine which allows for reminders and workflow to be administered by the system. It's not as sophisticated as some enterprise workflow automation solutions but for the price it's an awesome addition. Maintenance: Very rarely have a problem which needs to be dealt with and costs to upgrade are minimal at best. We hosted the system internally for the web client and implemented it ourselves initially but had upgrades subsequently done by a local partner simply due to time/cost scenario. In other words, less to have someone else do it. Read full review Email sequences. Create and send a sequence of emails until the sequence finishes or the contact replies to your email. You can also pause the sequence manually. Email sync. Syncs in real time with your email account, which is huge. Zapier integration. We've automated a lot of our pipeline management through the Zapier integration. This saves us soooo much time. Read full review Cons Not intuitive to use. I will have to contact support for help if I haven't used some functions in a while. It's near impossible to delete duplicates as they have to be deleted individually. This is a problem if you have more than 5000 contacts. Reporting is difficult. Read full review Make it so one can set the time at which the emails go out. Make it easier to set up my workflow. Joe Gatto VP of Marketing & International Business Development
Read full review Likelihood to Renew There are a lot of good SaaS options on the market but SwiftPage ACT still has a place in the mix today. It depends on your needs, goals, processes, and people
Read full review Usability Try printing reports with each record's notes section - really awful output that you are embarrassed to show anyone. Want to add a new record to a group, ACT will present another record for the group assignment. Want to work seamlessly with email? Forget it!
Read full review It's my favorite CRM to recommend to sales organizations. Robust Telephony options including a Power Dialer, SMS, and Voice Drop, are completely integrated into the CRM. The kicker is you can have "Unlimited" contacts where many platforms charge based on the number of users. This can make a huge difference in monthly billing.
Read full review Support Rating There has been an ongoing problem with Google synchronisation which no one seems to be bothered about fixing, even though it clearly states on the website that the software synchronises with Google. When the customer-facing support team are on the phone, they are brilliant, it's the back-end development support which is severely lacking.
Read full review I haven't really had the need to use their support, but the only time I had an issue with the platform, the Close team was very attentive and responded in a short span of time. Also they take minimal time to solve issues. The only con here is there is no way to reach out to them apart from email.
Read full review Implementation Rating Delay your upgrades! ACT appears to ship out new software with virtually no checking and no concern about bad installs do to their customers.
Read full review Alternatives Considered ACT! CRM is more cost effective than like a
Salesforce , but that is for a reason, it lacks a lot of the functionality that a
Salesforce has.
Pipedrive is actually another cost effective platform I've been evaluating as a potential ACT! CRM replacement. I like it's modern day look and feel versus ACT!.
Read full review Pipedrive was great for us for a long time. We used it for over 4 years. Our product and process was simple. When things got more complex, we needed something that could handle our growing needs and
Pipedrive kept falling short. We built our own custom solution in
Airtable and though it worked, we spend a lot of time managing it. Close was able to solve all our issues and save us hours per week in admin work.
Read full review Return on Investment It's been easy to keep track of progress of goals with the software. This provides the opportunity to know what is working and what is not. We have had to adjust a lot of things since the Virus issue took a foothold, but it is providing invaluable to make those adjustments. Our ROI has increased at least 30%. Read full review Positive - It's much easier now with Close.io to make sure that no deal falls through the cracks. Therefore helping us recover lost revenue. Read full review ScreenShots