Act! CRM vs. GoldMine CRM (discontinued)

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

GoldMine brings some great Sales forecasting tools to the table. By using the set analytics business can properly be forecast and adjusted as new variables are added. Trends are easy to pick out once set up and running. The whole list of customization allows most businesses to make adjustments on the fly to produce better results in the field. From small operation on up GoldMine will scale to fit your needs.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Organizing trouble tickets or "cases" in customer profiles. They are associated with the customer, so you can go into any customer record and click the cases tab and sort them by any of their columns.
• The dashboard is invaluable as a support technician. It allows me to find my trouble tickets and sort them by the date they were last updated, allowing me to continuously follow up on older ones as time goes on.
• The integration of companies, contacts, and cases is essential, as it allows our departments to access the same pools of information efficiently.

Incentivized

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• Email marketing add-on service is far from user friendly and outdated in flexibility for creating useful emails.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

Incentivized

• GoldMine itself can be a little hard to use if editing the information within the program is not enabled. This comes into play if the main information storage is another system that is migrated to GoldMine
• Third party apps or software can be complicated to be moved into GoldMine history. It is possible, but requires some upkeep and maintenance.
• GoldMine takes A LOT of expertise to set up. If set up incorrectly by a bad representative, then it can affect the overall usage of the program in significant ways. Make sure you ask the Goldmine rep several questions and get recommendations for the rep as well as the product.

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

If there were a product that would mean less on-site support/maintenance with comparable or not much more cost, I would seriously consider switching. Furthermore, going to a more mobile, paper-less application process would tip the scales in the favor of a competitor. I'd also like something that integrates web forms so that data entry is more stream-lined as is response time

Try printing reports with each record's notes section - really awful output that you are embarrassed to show anyone. Want to add a new record to a group, ACT will present another record for the group assignment. Want to work seamlessly with email? Forget it!

Personally, perhaps I should give it a higher rating, but I do genuinely think it was very easy to pick up and run with, but I did have a full training session and of course was keen on using it. In my previous marketing role many years ago, I 'd tried to create an MS Access database and this has taken ages, so being introduced to the power of GoldMine really impressed. People have comments on it, but my opinion is its still fast and a great workhorse

For me, its always been there, no worries here about downtime or the internet being down or switched off. Having it on a laptop as well with Goldsync means I'm always able to updated my notes and then synchronise. This to me is one of the benefits of purchased on-premise software, it cant simply be turned off!.

Pretty good, Yes, there are occasions when i may think there should be an easier way to do things, but over the years, I've always found a way to get the information out that i want, sometimes just needing a bit of help from the technical team. Day to day,. it works for me very well.

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.

Their customer support is spot on! We never feel like we're being made to wait, and when we email, they respond and offer assistance very quickly. It's the same response I'd expect from an in-house IT team down the corridor. Some support teams you know you're talking to the first line support chap who probably doesn't know how to resolve your issue, and you have to wait until they give up and pass it, but GM support people seem very knowledgable

Incentivized

I was originally trained by the UK distributor and then subsequently trained my self and had access to GoldMine consultants. In the long run, this saved me a lot of time really since I knew the product on an advanced/administrator basis and able to perform day to day tasks. Some things, still needed the consultants. The trick was with the training, I knew when I was out of my depth

Delay your upgrades! ACT appears to ship out new software with virtually no checking and no concern about bad installs do to their customers.

As I said earlier, to me now with all this experience, it is ensuring that you focus on two things:- 1/ Ensure core customisations only are required until you get users started and embedded in using the system. 2/ Ensuring users get some good level of dedicated training time, internal or external, but I feel this is best done in a group rather than at your own speed. Afterall, no one really customises their MS Word or MS Excel each time, they just ignore the bits they don't need or ask if they do need them

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

We use this with GoldMine when placing our orders, they both have there uses with in our company. We also use Zoom for automatic emails and calls, this tool is more for searching for the right contact within the companies I work with. I think GoldMine covers a lot more of my needs and [OSAS] Traverse [ERP] is just for billing purposes.

GoldMine, when maintained well has always been pretty reliable and in over 10 years, I don't think we've ever lost a day or more than an hour or so when we cant use it. Occasional a 'blip' will happen and you will have to log out, the only thing to bear in mind, which I'm not good at is ensuring you keep the mailbox to less than 2000 mails in your inbound box, I hover around 1800 and need to streamline this to get rid of my junk or notifications from LinkedIn groups for example when i mean to read, but never get round to it

• Very poor return on investment. It is now quite costly and the support service no longer offers assistance except if the program crashes.
• Swiftpage seems to have replaced their skilled UK based support team with a call centre?? The service I got was dreadful. This is a difficult program to use and support is vital.
• You will need some IT skills to properly use ACT! Don't rely on their support which is not good.

• Documentation and easy access to documentation regarding a particular customer or contact.
• While utilities exist to re-align territories and other assignments in Goldmine they are not always well documented so even if you are savvy and want to implement some functions yourself you will likely need a VAR support person to do the job for you -- at least the first time.
• Typically, I have found support to be responsive and prompt. More importantly, even with drive failures, we rarely suffer any downtime with Goldmine.