Users Facing Problems with Act!

Act! CRM Integration Problems

“Activities do not roll. Outlook email does not integrate at all”

Customer Relationship Management programs are often judged on their ability to increase customer relationship — after all, that’s exactly what they’re being advertised to do. They try to reach this aim, but giving various options and abilities to the user or company, through which they can help to forge a better understanding between said company and their customer.

This forms strong customer satisfaction and leads to loyal customers. Thus, most companies use only the best customer relationship management programs, as forging this understanding and bond is very vital to their business. When companies purchase these customer relationship management programs, they often look for programs that work great out-of-the-box and come with very few bugs — if at all. Obviously, these programs aren’t exactly cheap, and thus, wanting good functionality from them is a right of the buyer. However, some customer relationship management programs don’t perform to their fullest extent and can be a cause of let-down for many customers and product buyers.

Act! CRM Software has also failed to provide the needed functionality that most of its users desire and need. These lack of functions can include things such as a lack of training videos, or the incompatibility of Act! 16 or lower Act! programs with Windows 10. Along with these glaring issues, the program also has lots of bugs such as report section constantly freezing or lagging, and the activities not rolling. Another common issue that is discussed by many users is the fact that Outlook email does not integrate at all with Act!. This is obviously a big issue, considering the massive usage and popularity of Outlook. It is perhaps the most commonly used email for business-related tasks, and having little to not integration for it, certainly causes Act! to be much behind its times when compared to other customer relationship management programs out there.

PCMAG, on their review of Act! stated:

“Act! Premium Software lets you manage all the information about your contacts in one place. It’s not easy to use Act! ontact software as it feels more like a beefed-up contact manager than a true customer relationship management (CRM) service.”

About the lack of additional functions, and needing extra information and knowledge to use the program efficiently, they added:

“Dated interface. Confusing menu options. Trial is a demo, not a fully functional trial. May require extra training to learn how to use.”

The full review can be read here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369360,00.asp

Regarding the lack of integration that the program has, a user and customer mentioned:

“Act! is completely useless. I’ve tried using it over the years. It never consistently works. Integration with Outlook is a complete fantasy. It randomly won’t open. The files are never backed up correctly. It’s truly the most perniciously foul program ever created. It could only be this bad is done on purpose. No one, regardless of how incompetent, could even accidentally design code this bad – so it has to be deliberate.”

While the sentiments of this particular user may seem a bit harsh, there is no doubt that there is a lot of truth in what they have mentioned. The program does suffer from a lack of integration with Outlook, which makes it a very unsuitable to be called a true customer relationship management program.

Finally, another user shared their opinion on Act!, calling it very outdated, and that it required too many clicks to reach a conclusion that other customer relationship management programs can achieve in 2 or 3 clicks.

“Awful product! Stay away. I have to reinstall every month or so to keep features running. Tech support is useless. Despite the review here from LGerrand, this product hasn’t really changed that much since the early 2000’s. They are behind in Windows support. If you want to see how bad this company and its reseller and product are, login to the support community and just look at how many bugs there are in the system – some of them going back 10 years or more. This company is useless. They are milking 15 year old technology and haven’t added a substantive feature in 15 years. It takes 20 clicks to do some things that should be able to be done in 2 or 3 clicks. Does the company care one bit? Absolutely not. They get new owners every 2-3 years, and I hope things will change, but the company has a culture of mediocrity, and they rarely achieve even that with support.”

This huge problem and issue is what is keeping the program far behind what is available today. However, even so, no program is beyond repair. Even if Act! does lack a lot of functionality that is easily available in other customer relationship management programs, it is possible to add these features to the program and make it much better by reducing the amount of bugs that are present, while also making the overall environment much more user friendly, and suitable towards beginners.

The program requires a few more functions, and need additional compatibility with Windows 10 to reduce the amount of issues that arise during the usage of the program. Act! is undoubtedly a very old program, and during that time it has managed to gain a lot of people that use it and have become accustomed to it. However, if the program wishes to branch out and be more attractive to newer people in current times, then it must change some of its features to better appeal to the companies of today’s time.