Act! CRM vs. Nutshell CRM

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

This can be used for different industries, healthcare, IT, retail or any company with a customer service line, big or small. if i had to ask, i would say "Do you have any type of filing system that you use?" "anything where you are keeping track of personal/ business information." Do you need access to information on a day to day basis? If they do , then this can be used , especially if you need to keep track of the numbers; we like how we can see if are things going up or down.

• 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.

• Customization - we are able to make Nutshell make the most sense for our company and processes
• Scheduling - the ability to set tasks allows us to never forget a follow-up call or email
• Tags - allow us to prioritize leads and segment our customers and potential customers
• Communication - the ability to tag colleagues in notes for callbacks or updates to accounts is very helpful to keep everyone on the same page
• Email History - being able to blind copy all our email communication to Nutshell, allows us to have email threads and notes all in one place

Incentivized

• 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.

• SWOT analysis --- currently we put this in as custom fields but they don't link up at all and are hard to read/navigate. We also use the custom fields for other information we want to capture. It would be nice to build those in so they can show the info as bullet points or something --- currently paragraph form and hard to find things at a glance.
• Funnel could use some work. Only shows how many leads are currently in that part of the pipeline which doesn't give us a good historical comparison.

Incentivized

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

This is perfect for a small business / Home based business with SaaS. Nutshell constantly adds new features and the price is much better than more robust software like Salesforce.

Incentivized

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!

Very easy to use, great for small office

Incentivized

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.

Nutshell's support team has always been great and they tend to go above and beyond. They are polite, friendly, personable and great listeners. They are also great about sending follow up emails too.

Incentivized

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

Implementation is difficult everytime but this was relatively simple due to the small amount of data we moved

Incentivized

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

Well, my team had trials for these others and they all prefer Nutshell for different reasons. I prefer it as I need a user-friendly software to help me out as I am not a big tech guy. I have heard others in the office say things like they like the way activities are scheduled better, or the way nothing ever gets accidentally erased if they hard crash or power goes out.

Incentivized

• 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

• Nutshell's mobility has provided significant ROI for me since we've started using the CRM. I've been able to provide immediate feedback to clients, schedule meetings from the field with confidence, and much more.
• Nutshell's tagging features have helped us craft custom mailing/email lists. We struggled to do this in the past.

Incentivized