Act! CRM vs. Vincere

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.

Incentivized

The training videos are a great tool for someone new to the system, and lines up really well with the ease of use that the system demonstrates overall - my team all watched these over the course of a week and became fairly proficient in using the system before we had it rolled out. Previously systems i have used haven't allowed for the extraction of financials in enough detail from the system. Vincere allows us to break our data down by contingent and retained, then by stage in order to truly see our pipeline in detail.

• 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.

• Pipeline management: the system gives a $ value for every part of the recruiting pipeline so I can accurately forecast what revenue is coming in. I've never seen this in a recruitment CRM, I believe it's quite a unique feature.
• Price: although pricing was not the #1 criteria for me when I am choosing software, we are saving big with Vincere. I am paying $39/licence each month. This is a saving of 70% on our previous vendor yet the quality of the system is much better.
• Search: this is probably the feature that our consultants appreciate most. The advanced search allows you to search contextually across everything in the system and really refine and drill down into the nitty gritty.

• The auto saving function is not great. It means a simple slip or mistype can change an entire record easily.
• The reports are clunky and if you've changed the field names, that doesn't get reflected in the reports.
• The interface is still clunky. It is hard to see all the information for a contact all in one place. It gets broken up too much.

Incentivized

• While Vincere has spell check correcting keyboard, spelling and grammatical errors is more difficult than it should be. This is somewhat mitigated by ongoing development in other areas.
• Vincere invoicing systems could be improved. This is not a huge problem if you don't have multiple accounts with parent company access group but we do and this can be confusing at times. Not a deal breaker by any standards so more a general comment than a complaint.

Once our current subscription expires, we no longer plan to use ACT. We are moving to a more complete CRM system that allows us, as a project based service company, to track projects, contacts, time and employees all with one software program. ACT has very limited modules to integrate these functions and therefore is no longer a good fit for us.

Incentivized

We just implemented Vincere and the chance of changing to a different soon is limited

Incentivized

ACT follows the basic rules you would expect for this type of software, but actually doing anything sophisticated with it is near impossible without assistance or training. Unless you use it regularly it is difficult to use. I wouldn't recommend it unless you have internal IT support and it will be used regularly.

Great candidate management. A UI that could do with further visual development. Easy to use functions and great support from the Vincere team. Slightly clunky process for making a placement. Great candidate pics and star ratings. Overall easy of use that drives good adoption from my team

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.

Our Implementation Consultant Alan is super helpful 10/10 recommend!! If I have a question he gets in contact super fast. If he does not have an answer right away he talks to other departments and gets back in thouch within 48 hours. He was definitely the most helpful person out of everyone we talked to

Delay your upgrades! ACT appears to ship out new software with virtually no checking and no concern about bad installs do to their customers.

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!.

Incentivized

I selected Vincere as it offered everything (on paper and in the demo) that Bullhorn did for half the price (the market leader at the time). I should have realised not every deal is a deal. The product from month one displayed performance issues with the speed of the product they remain and have been constantly a point of complaint from my team, we had multiple bugs from day one, these bugs remain now or have been replaced with other bugs. The demo, the literature all claimed one thing and we received another. In comparison we have received excellent service from Zoho and their best in breed, rather one product for all approach offers a far more powerful offering for genuinely half the price without the need for us to spend further money on 3rd party products because those built into Vincere did not work as advertised.

• 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%.

Incentivized

• Accountability: Vincere has helped us shift the way we manage consultants. Everyone can see what they've done inside Vincere, the system is quite transparent so even your junior consultants can see where they need to pick things up.
• ROI was fast for us. You move from an old system to a modern platform like Vincere and it's like turning on the lights. Just having the mobile app was a revelation to us! Then you add on the dashboards, the LinkedIn integration, the constant upgrades.
• Analytics: we used to track everything on Excel and whiteboards. We've since shifted that to the automated reporting inside Vincere.