Act!

Pros

The fact that I was able to use the product immediately with no instruction was a great pro. Entering data and retrieving info about a client is easy, and building history of calls, Email messages, letters in a record is great.

Cons

I am not happy with support as all they do is provide a fix when there is a problem, but not direction in how to build reports or use other functionality. I have had to fix the same problem with direction from their service group several times. If I ask for help with reports they tell me I need to find a consultant for that.

Pros

I like the fact that a team of 5 can share effectively in real time, I like the ease of changing layouts and adding fields, and with Seamless the ablity to easily prdcue high quality documenation. It's link to outlook and ODBC is good and it is a stable, which being at the core of our business is a good thing

Cons

There are many things I think we could do to be more productive but can't, and we do see fields being changed or lost "by themselves". The web version was a poor version of the Pro, and we haven't been able to make it available when offline, which is a frustration.

Alternatives Considered

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Pros

It does everything I do - but better. Marketing automation and data capture has transformed how we work

Cons

There's nothing not to like about ACT! At all.

Pros

At this moment, I am struggling to think of anything positive to say about my Act! experience. Both my boss and I have had problems since we bought it. I have lost entire days' worth of sales time on the phone with their tech support trying to fix issue after issue. And to make matters worse, they keep telling me to give them more money if I want better, faster, more competent customer service. All I want is for the program to work correctly and do what they promised it would do!

Cons

This program is seriously glitchy, and the customer service experience has been bad. I have spent countless hours on the phone trying to get issues resolved. And to add insult to injury, they keep telling me that if I want better customer service and faster, more professional support I need to give them more money. If you believe in your product then, stand behind it and fix it. My boss and I have spent enough time (and money via lost sales revenue) dealing with Act's technical issues already, so I wish they would stop telling me we need to shell out more.
After two days on the phone with them, having been escalated to their Level 3 support guy, my Outlook started to have problems immediately after hanging up with him. I have never had a single problem with Outlook since I started using it. Over the last two days, three different tiers of tech support have remotely accessed my laptop, gone into my Outlook as administrators, and messed around with it. Though they managed to fix the mail merge issues I was initially having with Act!, they clearly messed up my Outlook along the way. Now they claim it is a complete coincidence that Outlook started sending me error messages the moment I hung up with their top tier tech guy. They keep telling me the problems are not related, it is solely the problem of Outlook, they are not experts in Outlook, and I should call Outlook's tech support for help.
Clearly, it is not a coincidence or unrelated. And clearly, they are confident enough in their Outlook expertise to go into my program and mess with it. And as tech support for a software program that works with Outlook, they should be trained and qualified to work with Outlook in the first place. I have asked repeatedly to have their top tier guy call me back. He knows what he did, so he should be able to track down his mistake and fix it. But they keep saying they can't do that without me shelling out more money.
As if all of that wasn't enough, during my last conversation with their support, I had to force the rep to stop trying to get me off the phone and to fix the new problem that had cropped up with Act! just today: the loss of my email history. It took her close to an hour, and she finally discovered that my email history was now gone from Act! because one of the three techs who has remotely accessed my computer over the last two days accidentally replaced my database with a demo database. And even in light of that, she still tried to say that the issue with Outlook had nothing to do with anything their tech staff did. She continued to insist it was all just a coincidence.
I told her I felt the time had come to talk to a supervisor, and I asked her to put one on the phone. After placing me on hold once again, she finally came back and said a supervisor was unavailable, and one would have to call me back in 10 minutes. It ended up taking close to an hour to hear from him. He did finally fix the Outlook problem, but when I asked him what I should do if the error messages come back in an hour or two, he said I had to start all over again from the bottom. The whole routine: wait on hold, start with a low-level tech, slowly work up the ladder, all of it. That or pay the fee.
The next day, the Outlook error message came back! And I had to lose that day as well trying to get them to fix it. I spoke to my boss, and he said the same thing happened to him a while back, where they tried to blame Outlook. So my boss said he started a conference call with the Act! tech guy and the Microsoft tech guy on the phone at the same time, and lo and behold, the problem turned out to be with ACT, not Microsoft.

Pros

ACT! is the best CRM available and has stood the test of decades. No other CRM comes close. It's report structure is unmatched as is the customizable features. ALSO - exporting and backup are relatively easy to use. It has a very nice user-intuitive interface.

Cons

ACT! is no longer available as a purchasable software but only as a subscription. Also the syncing of clients from email would be nice as well as better syncing between email client and ACT!