SOFTWARE REVIEWS
Reviewed by Terrence V. O'Brien and Barry de Ville
Managing Relationships
CONTACT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE PROGRAMS
are targeted at managing activities linked to other people. They are specialized rela-tionship databases that have traditionally been useful to salespersons and consul-tants. Now, however, the software is wide-ly used by many kinds of professionals.
In this column, we take a look at the biggest selling contact manager, ACT! which comes in versions for DOS, Macintosh, Windows, and Hewlett Packard palmtop computers (95, 100, and 200 LX models). We will evaluate the Windows and palmtop versions,
ACT! version 2,0 for Windows is a con-taet management application published by Symantec Software. On the surface, this appears to fall into the class of software commonly called "personal productivity products." And, although it's true that a contact manager is certainly a personal productivity tool, it's also much more because data systematically collected through prospect and eustomer contacts can form the basis of a marketing database.
Terrence V. O'Brien (left) is a Marketing Professor at Northern Illinois University, De Kalb.
Barry de Ville is Vice President of Development for NYGEM Corp. in Ottawa.
An analysis of this marketing database ean tell the enterprise who are the best cus-tomers and prospects, what are their defin-ing characteristics, where they came from and where they are located now, and how best to target old, new, and prospective customers, including an identification of targeting message content. This last use of a contact management software package like ACT! is particularly relevant to market research professionals.
What Is a Contact Manager?
Contact manager software allows the user to store a database of client or cus-tomer contacts and record notes that are associated with the contacts, as well as tag "bring forward" dates for particular actions, such as a telephone follow-up or an appointment for a meeting.
Contact managers are quite important for sales activities, and especially useful for sales professionals whose monthly con-tacts can number well into the hundreds. Under these circumstances, a contact man-ager is a particularly effective method of keeping on top of client, customer, and prospect contact histories and the bring-forward activities.
As the front-end data collection instru-ments for the construction of a marketing database, a contact manager application with the proper architecture can be used to build a comprehensive and consistent set of data that helps describe and manage the organiza-tion's sales and marketing activities.
Common contact managers include the ACT! and Maximizer packages. Another contact manager, TeleMagic, is specifical-ly designed for telemarketing applications. In practice, they all contain the same basic set of functions:
• The ability to record customer attributes, such as name, address, telephone num-ber, and organization affiliation. • The ability to record an activity
sum-mary, including notes and a contact record for each contact,
• The ability to attach documents to pre-recorded names and addresses to cre-ate custom letters and do volume mail-ings with mail/merge operations. • The ability to schedule bring-forward
dates for calls and appointments, • The ability to select subsets of the
database, according to combined
selec-RATING GUIDE • • • EXCELLENT • • • VERY GOOD • • • GOOD • • FAIR • POOR NR NOT RATED
Exhibit 1
File Edit Schedule Phone Write Report Lookup View Window Help
Ordered 10 boxes GO Ib. cover
tion criteria, in order to identify a sub-group for special treatment.
• The ability to produce a data summary file, suitable for analysis.
• The ability to produce summary re-ports for progress reviews.
• Connections to communications ports for autodial, fax, and electronic mail use.
Sales Management
ACT! is designed as a sales profession-al's contact manager. The root of the data-base is the home record; this is a complete data description of the database owner, you. Across the top of the screen are key
menu items and "power bar" menu icons. The icon bar allows you to schedule a call, meeting, or to-do. Other icons are available to write a letter, view activities for a con-tact, view or edit notes for a concon-tact, view the contact history, use the autodialer, or display the daily calendar.
Icons also are presented to display a task list, view the contact list, toggle between screen layouts, and create, read and send e-mail messages. (See Exhibit 1 for a Windows screen and Exhibit 2 on page 44 for the palmtop screen.)
The software allows you to define search terms to identify key subsets of the database or key activities. Thus, you can quickly identify "to-do's", "mail items" and "referred by" records. This is pretty handy.
ACT! also serves as an activity uler. Eor example, once a meeting is sched-uled, it can be displayed on a daily, week-ly, or monthly calendar. You can ask to be reminded of the meeting with an audio cue, if desired. The Windows alert is shown in Exhibit 3 on page 45. (The palmtop version will tum the machine on and then alert you!)
The software's note-taking feature can be activated quickly through an icon click, and each note is automatically tagged with a date stamp.
There are a number of "user" fields in ACT! (15 to be exact), and all of these can be assigned a custom designation by the user. Eor example, you can create a field called "probability" to estimate the probability of a close. "Amount" could be used to record
Exhibit 2
File Edit Schedule Clear Lookup Phone View Xpenses Report Quit
Company: Express Office Supply Contact: Tim Kelly
Phone: 214-357-4909 X: CC: 1 Title: Owner
Sec: Jayne Dear: Tim Address: 4000 N. Montgomery
City: Fort Worth St: TX Zip: 75061 Call: 04/15/92 8:00a Quote
Meeting: 10/07/92 4:00p Show new produ*-To-do: / / :
Screenl 2 of 11 07/28/94 4:35p
Help Edit Week rindr J Npvt
order amount and "affiliation" to record affiliation. It is useful to ereate a "master/slave" field to define a purchasing agent in an organization, for example, who is "responsible" for a number of produets that may be registered to end users
throughout the organization. One of the most useful features of ACT! is its ability to perform a key word search of the entire database (and associated records, like the contact form) to find a given term (or part of a term).
For example, if you want-ed to find all the "statisti-cians" in your database, you could search on "stat" or "Stat" or "statistic." This retrieves a smaller set of records that you can then browse through. Tbe search
term also supports wild eards. allowing you to specify the asterisk to match any-thing. So the search for "statistieian" could also be "stat*" or "*tistic." The same menu (Lookup) can be used to create a custom query that uses combinations of Boolean operations (e.g.. AND and OR) to perform more sophisticated searches (e.g.. "stat"
and "market researeh").
When you open the menu to write a let-ter or memorandum. ACT! will
automati-One of the
most useful
features of
ACT! is its
ability to
per-form a key
word search of
the entire
database.
cally plug in the name, address, and saluta-tion Informasaluta-tion from tbe contact record. The software takes an informal perspective and automatically uses the first name of the contact for the greeting, but you can specify something else if you wish. ACT! can import information to paste into the letter from a variety of formats, such as Word and WordPerfect. Mail merges are easily aecom-plished, and you have the ability to do subgroup selee-tions for group laigeting with mailings.
There are a couple of problem areas in the word processing capabilities of ACT!; although the word processor is a full-featured word processor, it still has limitations compared to what you might be used to with Word or WordPerfect. So, it would be nice if ACT! were able to support the use of other word processors.
It is also possible to bring in data from other databases and contaet managers, including earlier versions of ACT! The only catch here is, you need to do the fieid assignments (e.g., the old field "Eirm" is tbe new ACT! field "Company"). We imported an ACT! file into the new
ver-sion. This worked fine but it seemed to be needlessly slow. On a 486 machine, the new ACT! was taking four minutes per record to bring in the old contact database. It appeared to be recalculating its indices with each record, a seemingly unnecessari-ly time-consuming operation.
The software does have a good tickler file that automatically generates warning messages for certain days, times, and types of events (meetings, appointments, "to-dos"). Database Construction
We mentioned that contact managers also can form tbe basis of a front end for the construction of a marketing database for the enterprise. This is an important function because building a marketing database is the first step towards a data-driven database marketing strategy. The database can serve as an analysis resource for detecting eustomer. product, and market trends.
As the cost of collecting custom data continues to rise, tbis "free" corporate resource for market analysis will become inereasingly important.
ACT! is beginning to take steps to posi-tion itself beyond a personal productivity tool. For example, it has network funetions (including a system administrator) and can interlace with popular groupware e-mail products like cc:Mail. ACT! has a way to go, however; the product is devoid of any data analysis capabilities, for example.
A high-level analysis capability, similar to what you might expect to fmd in an ele-mentary statistical package or information system would be exceptionally useful at both the individual account manager and global market analysis levels.
ACT! may also have problems with large contact databases, a common occur-rence with enterprise wide marketing data-bases. We found a problem with a contact database that had just over 500 contacts, which is not very large! With the shipped version 2 product, there was difficulty entering notepad entries for new contacts; ACT! gave an error message and refused to let us enter the note. Symantec's customer support was excellent and indulgent. The eompany sent a version 2.01 fix through CompuServe, but, unfortunately, this did not fix the problem.
Exhibit 3
Criticai Alarm
You lukve a
In this case, the new "fix" simply termi-nated execution and bounced us back to Windows when we tried to enter the new notepad entry. Admittedly, this happened with an old contact database tbat was brougbt in through importing. This prob-lem did not present itself with larger con-tact databases that were built into ACT! 2.0 from scratch. But, it may be worth consid-ering as a factor in your application: Be sure, if you have previous ACT! databases that will be converted, that no information will be lost or rendered uneditable.
ACT! is available for various hardware platforms and operating systems from Symantee Corp., 10201 Torre Ave., Cupertino. CA 95014-2132, (408) 253-9600, The Windows and the palmtop ver-sions are $280 and $130, respectively (lower prices for upgrades or from soft-ware discounters). Network versions are available as well.
A C T ! FOR W I N D O W S (V. 2.0)
Strengths
It's fast, powerful, and easy to use, and has standard dBase compatible files (*.DBF). You can do global character string searches (including history and
notes), and edit (that is. customize) the pop-up menus. It has a fairly good word processor, extensive data input (Your Way, Lotus Organizer, Maximlzer. Packrat, ACT version I. dBase. ASCII, DOS ACT!. MAC ACT!. Q&A. RTF, 1st ACT, HP 95/100/200). and good
export (ASCII. dBase. HP 95/100/200, MAC, etc.) capabilities. E-mail includes Lotus cc:Mail, MS Mail, and CompuServe.
ACT! will expoii docu-ments (e.g., letters, notes) as TXT or RTF and includes fax capabilities with WinFax Pro. You can add new menu options to the Lookup,
Re-port, and Write funetions, and the system supports DDE (dynamie data exchange) aeross other Windows software. The manual is excellent: 25% overview and tutorial. 50% A-to-Z reference .section. 25% appendixes and index. Printing formats are extensive. Overall, ACT! is a elassy product.
Weaknesses
This is distinctly a person-centered approach: if you organize and plan by pro-jects, this is not for you—get a project manager or a conventional database
The palmtop
version has
lots of
well-organized
information
per contact.
instead. The three-part format of Calls, Meetings, and To-Do's is fixed. We were not able to set an alarm that eould be heard in noisy offices. In the word processor, the spell check has a "Skip" function (meaning skip just once) but not an "Ignore for this document" function.
ACT! FOR HP 95/100/200 (v. 1.1)
Strengths
The palmtop version has lots of well-organized information per contact. The program installs in only 140 KB of space. It has nice popup menus, and you ean add comments on the popup screens. The Lookup menu changes automatically when you change a field label, and you can direct reports to printer, screen, or disk file. The many time-saving features inelude such things as defaulting to current date upon entering information. Most field names can be edited. Another useful feature is the VAT (value added tax) setting on the expense screen for European setup. Weaknesses
The software cannot search notes or have them as a Lookup item. There are no * or ? lookups. The HP 100/200 sereen is not optimal: it's basi-cally the smaller HP95 screen. You are limited to 4,000 con-tacts and 400 activities and can only add one user lookup field. We could not get task switch-ing to work with Lotus 1-2-3, even with a 2 MB machine and the full 640 KB of RAM. The structure of calls, meet-ings, and to-do's is fixed. Reports to screen are 80 x 25 only and cannot be reduced to smaller HP95. for example.
Several top menu items begin with the same letter (Company. City: Next Screen, Notes, etc.), so selecting funetions by the first letter is not reliable. The distracting cursor shows through popup menus. We were not able to back up through data screens for a contact. Not all ACT! func-tions are available (Referenee Library, Access, Merged), and expense fields are not recorded in history. Finally, data files are nonstandard. li!dil