Act! CRM vs. Oracle Sales

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

Excellent as a customer relationship management tool, sales forecasting, building better sales plan for the entire deal lifecycle using critical and complex data, a 360-degree comprehensive view of vendors, partners, customers. Ensuring high standards and consistency is maintained in pricing so that quotes are competitive for prospective customers. At the end of the day, this is an excellent tool for selling and closing deals while being able to access needed information in one place.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Easy to sell products[.]
• Build customers and make customer hub[.]
• Tracking the sales cycle from marketing to sell the product[.]
• Build Reports and Anayltics related to opportunities, leads, and service requests[.]
• Getting customers issues after and before selling[.]
• High ability to integrate with Oracles other products and 3rd products using Rest and Soap APIs[.]
• Restrict users using RBAC role based access[.]

Incentivized

• 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

• I would like to see more integration with other CRMs such as Salesforce.
• We have each business unit built into Salesforce and it can track the amount of gross profit that flows through our Oracle database. It then further it trickles to each sales rep and what they've closed during their time at the company. These figures are not always accurate.
• It be difficult navigating to accounts and drilling down into each specific customer to understand details.

Incentivized

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

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.

Overall our organization has completely moved to Oracle CX Sales and now is able to utilize the latest technology backed by AI to provide a much better experience to customers and saving money at the same time. So it's a Win-Win situation. I believe there is a slight learning curve to derive [the] full value out of this but once you are there, you can delight your customers.

Incentivized

Some of the more complex customer reports we have created are slow to run at times.

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.

The support the Oracle team gives is generally very good. They are patient, willing to help, and their training methods are collaborative and inclusive. They have conducted multiple support sessions and it’s always been a great user experience. The stellar team [is] always on hand to lend support when the right time comes and their helpdesk is always on hand to help.

Incentivized

Excellent online training material. On-demand always helps to access anytime, anywhere. Also, it is essential that in this day and age, video tutorials with actual product screenshots make the learning more useful and fun at the same time. Certifications help test knowledge gained during these tutorial sessions. This was a blessing for fresh users.

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.

If you have never used a CRM program is is hard to know exactly what you need. We had lots of changes during implementation and even more afterward once the users started working in it everyday. Also the partner we used didn't inform us about Allotments and not being able to Batch delete custom objects (you can now in recent releases). There were so many unknowns, that if I had it to do over, I would educate myself more and ask more questions of the partner that we used for implementation.

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

As compared to other CRM, this happens to be one of the best and most affordable as there are some cons, but the pros are great, and I have seen an increase in sales by using this platform. It works great for the sales process from start to end, like lead generation to closure.

Incentivized

When we purchased this system it was one of the more expensive options in the market. However, with an adjustment in service and a relative price structure, this has become a lot more cost-effective over the past few years. It’s now more of a middle-ranking in the pricing structure and I would definitely say this is value for money.

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

• We can very easily pull up a customer's order and provide any detail they need. The time this saves compared to manually tracking customer orders and accounts is incredible.
• Knowing exactly who is contacting customer service and what their orders status is before answering the calls makes the customer service reps job much easier than before.

Incentivized