Act! CRM

Opportunity management.

Client history.

Google synchronisation.

Software development response time.

User Fields provide organized space for KEY info outside of just contact info

Search feature within the database / CRM

A bit clunky / old school looking compared to other platforms out there

Running reports is a bit confusing

Would like to see more direct user-customization capabilities

Keeps prospect contact info

Documents history

Calendar features

Connection with a VOIP type system

Integration with other email applications

Analytics

Swiftpage ACT! unilaterally and retroactively changed the terms of all clients previously with ACT! Premium. We renewed September 2019 but they essentially cancelled this contract two months into the 12 month period. The really know how to increase revenue with nearly a 50% price increase. If you are a Swiftpage stockholder you are pretty happy about all of this. We clients are not.

No known strengths.

Many of us need to send a lot more emails than our standard email accounts will allow. We all also need to conform to federal laws about sending emails. So working with reputable firms that do bulk emails is essential. So we have to use third party services. EMarketing was awful. We would revise a template, dutifully save it multiple times, confirm our changes had been captured, and then send out an email campaign we were comfortable was going to work. Well, despite having done QC and being diligent about saving our work, Swiftpage sent out a version that reflected few if any of our changes. We totally lost confidence with EMarketing.

So Swiftpage's answer to the bulk email problem they created with EMarketing was to tell all their clients if they did not immediately move to version 21 they were going to lose all email capability. EMarketing was being shut down and all of us would have no capability to send emails. So let's do a little extortion and say with a nearly 50% increase in price we can help you.

Best of luck getting ACT! Marketing Automation to actually work! We have already wasted a lot of hours and have nothing to show for the lost time. The reason we are so convinced no one should have to endure the loss we have already suffered.

The software is so badly written customers are either forced to pay technical support to solve problems their software coders created or look to replace ACT.

Bulk email

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.

Organize data

Reminders about appointments and actions.

Preserve and easily retrieve history.

I'd like a cleaner interface between Gmail and ACT! without having to have all emails included in ACT!

I'd like "fuzzier" search. If I search for Mary it could also return Marie, much like the big search engines do.

I'd like more flexibility in name handling.

Can quickly search for an individual or company contact

Can gather broad amount of information about each contact

Can easily create emails to reach out to specific groups

Creating reports or creating searches for specific fields is not intuitive.

Email marketing add-on service is far from user friendly and outdated in flexibility for creating useful emails.

Installing updates creates issues, even though Swiftpage ACT! functioned properly before the update.

Figuring out how best to organize contacts into specific, searchable groups requires expert assistance and is not intuitive.

Support from Swiftpage ACT! is marginal at best; we rely on outside consultant instead, for an extra cost.

Data Analysis. ACT! does a good job of allowing us to create meaningful reports.

Keeping track of communication. ACT! integrates with Outlook to record all client communication by e-mail.

Custom dashboards. We have created custom data entry pages that simplify what we are trying to collect.

Customer support leaves a lot to be desired. Too often the answer is you can buy this other product that has the functionality that we had before.

Error reports are not easy to comprehend. Sending out an e-mail blast errors out if the size of the email is over about 2 MB. This is fine but there is no error message at all. It just doesn't send.

The price is pretty high for a non-profit such as ourselves.

Contact management is a very significant help

Ease of use and simplicity are the building blocks of Swiftpage ACT!. I have always found it easy to work with and understand when looking to use another feature...at least most of the time.

I really like the alert feature to keep track of necessary activities for each day.

The easy of viewing the past notes and history is a lot easier than many of the other bigger ticket CRMs.

I would probably use the phone app more if I remembered to always update the database to the web. I mostly use the desktop version.

I wish it was a little easier to update the options for repeating activity names while inputting a note or history.

Keeping track of up to date contact information

Allowing me to create useful contact documents easily

Save copies of all orders and next action tasks for each contact

Easier mobile application would be nice

Simple, easy to use

Can customize fields, not overwhelming to look at

Easy to act as admin and customize users, give team members access

Reports, usually just download the Excel file and customize it. Could create some more attractive printable reports.

System crashes once in a while--can work on performance

Like the new look but can still be a bit clunky when searching lists.

Letters to any contact

Lookup by any part of a name

Organizing customers and non-customers

Customer service

If you cannot figure it out yourself, do not use a feature!

Easy to install

Easy to use

Easy to modify

One issue we had was when we upgraded we had to rename all our computers because of some glitch in the install.

I would like to see them continue the desktop version as I have some customers that don't want to go online.

Cost is always a factor with anything.

History. You can archive all your email history for each contact

Great searchability through contacts!

Easy way to setup synchronization of remote databases to segment so Reps only have their contacts.

It is complicated to setup when you are first getting to know it. I recommend having a consultant set it up and then documenting the process so you can reproduce it.

You have to lock the database when you add/remove items to the drop down lists.

It could use a mapping function to show a map of all a Sales Rep's territory with Pins in each address. This would allow Sales Reps to view other customers in the areas of their appointments to maximize their productivity by visiting more customers in the same area.

Lots of fields for adapting the software to your own requirements.

Excellent tracking of activities/details in sales pipeline process.

Excellent robust reporting to provide a very clear picture of prospecting activities.

Tightly integrated with Sage Quantum accounting software to avoid double entry of prospect details into Customer/Sales module.

ACT! is a product that has been around a long time, and the interface is somewhat dated.

It isn't as easy to use as some of the newer products.

Social media marketing could be stronger.

SwiftPage is inexpensive and integrates with our CRM, which is ACT!

Their templates are outdated and difficult to work with. They frequently glitch causing them to look unprofessional in certain browsers.

They have very limited reporting capabilities.

What I really like are the interactions between ACT! and Swiftpage, it is a breeze sending out e-mail blasts.

It is also very easy to keep our prospect and client base synced between ACT! and Outlook.

You can have your customers interactions with your e-mail blast imported in ACT! so you can select the ones that really opened and clicked your e-mail.

Not all templates in Swiftpage are as easy as they look, especialy editing advanced templates tends to mess things up.

Selecting leads on specific interactions within Swiftpage does require some in depth training.

I would like some marketing automation, to feed the Swiftpage drip campaigns.

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.

Social Integration: The tool has a basic feed for LinkedIn information to feed into the system. The infusion of more Social Selling "signals" and "feeds" would be very helpful to instill more social selling into the framework.

Account vs. Contact: If you are a company which works to B to B rather than B to C there is a still a bit of cumbersome way to handle "joining" accounts and contacts through links. It is better with 16.1 release but still it's a "contact" centric solution which is great for some business relationships like realtors, insurance, & financial services etc.