Good CRM features, clunky UI
The Act! brand hails from a time before customer relationship management (CRM) was a real category, back when it was one of the more sophisticated contact managers available. Although the Act! software evolved into a cloud app with a browser-based front end, its UI remains stuck deep in the past. Act!’s integrated email marketing features might have what your small-to-midsize business needs to contact customers, but if you’re willing to endure its steep UI learning curve, you may as well check out Zoho CRM, our Editors‘ Choice pick for CRM that offers a deeper feature set and a more intuitive design at a similar price. Getting Started With Act!’s Clunky UI
As mentioned, Act!’s interface is a little old school, and you’ll see that right from the start. The main landing page has a left-hand nav like many modern systems, but there’s also an Act! CRM Classic button right next to it that drops the left-hand column and lets you focus on the top nav instead, as you would with a desktop app. Things get more retro as you go along. When we imported a CSV file containing our 50 test contacts, the import operation actually kicked off a dialog box-style wizard that looks exactly like what you’d get installing an older Windows application. This might sound cute and eclectic, but you’ll bump into a bunch of these while using Act!, and they quickly get annoying. The problem is that these dialogs don’t behave like typical web pop-ups, which either show the whole graphic in the box or at least put scroll bars in the frame so you can move around. Act! does neither. It always showed only a part of the dialog box, and usually not the part with the buttons we needed. That meant we had to manually resize the window until the buttons appeared. Frustrating. Another example of Act!’s counterintuitive UI is that the contact importing process kicks off from either a graphic on the Welcome screen or the top nav’s Tool menu. There’s no one-button access from inside the Contacts page, something we enjoyed with several other recent CRMs we tested. This is fine once you get used to thinking like a desktop user again, but it’s easy to forget that the top nav is even an option. Another minor annoyance is that Act!’s Welcome page, which would imply it’ll be your main landing page, isn’t really a welcome page. Just like Onpipeline, Act! takes you to wherever you left off in the app whenever you log into it. Worse, the contact importing process—the first action we tried—got off on the wrong foot. We started the import from the Welcome screen, which immediately popped up an „Import Wizard has been retired“ article from the support knowledgebase. There was a how-to link in the article, but that only took us back to what looked like an import wizard. That was confusing, but at least the import seemed to work as advertised. Only it didn’t. Even though the wizard stated that it had imported all 50 records, Act! wouldn’t display them. Only after digging around for a while did we figure out that the initial import didn’t work because we selected „Typical“ instead of „Custom Field.“ If you want to use Typical, you need to exactly match what the Act! database expects. Anything else is considered custom. Act! provides a CSV template that you can put your contacts into for Typical use, but it was disappointing to take this additional, manual step. Contacts, Groups, and Opportunities
Once your contacts are imported, you’ll see them in the Contacts view. The list view is dense, but it displays most everything you need to know about a contact. Still, we wish Act! provided more than a list view. Zoho CRM has a Kanban view, for instance. Where your users may start complaining is when they get into Companies, Groups, and Opportunities. Setting up groups kicked off another wizard that had to be resized, then launched yet another dialog inside the first one that also had to be resized. The Groups feature was easy to use, but a little strange. Clearly, it’s intended for salespeople to create customer, contact, and prospect groups. It’s also where you manage users, determining who has access to the database or who is a company employee. Those names are pulled from the contacts database, so apparently Contacts is where everything happens in Act! —customers, prospects, and users, too. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, just unexpected. Some groups are pre-populated if you added the right custom field to your import. We had one labeled „ID“ that stated whether the contact was a customer, a prospect, or a hot lead. Both the default Customer and Prospect groups were pre-set with this field when we got back into Act! after the spreadsheet import. That’s a big step up from Onpipeline, where even a basic CSV import didn’t work at all. Then again, when Onpipline added a contact with an Organization field, like „Company“, it automatically created the corresponding Organization or Company entry. Act! doesn’t, and this, too, quickly gets old. To create a Company record, we had to import the contact data (which included most of the company data), then go into the Companies tab, manually create the company contact, and then add the contact to the company record there.
