Help choosing between MS Office and Act 2000

[roxylee]

I am setting up a new telemarketing office and I'm trying to make a
decision on whether to use Act! 2000 or Microsoft Office.

The biggest reasons for the dilema is that we desire the end results to
be completely electronic and be able to be emailed, with a link to
yahoo or mapquest, that link showing the location of the customer that
is referred to in the email. Secondly, we need reports to show
telemarketers and salespersons activity over periods of time.

Our steps:

We have an existing database of customers that contains the usual name
address phone, etc.

we contact these customers to set appointments. A person will go out
to see them based on the contact made by the telemarketer.

when we phone the customers, we need to track 3 things:
when they've been called,
who has called them,
the results (which can be a subset of 4 things: 1. an appointment was
set, they need to be called back at certain time, no contact was made,
or refused offer and don't call back.)

If an appointment is made, I need to send an email to a salesperson
with the customers information (name, address, phone, history....) all
of which are stored in the database. The email needs to include the
following appointment information: who made it, when it's for, and
especially the URL to a web page showing travel information (this is
all car info, not flight).

I currently cut and paste access info into a word document, add the URL
from mapquest, where I have to manually enter the address info, cut and
paste the word page into an email and send that email off to the
salesperson.

I'm somewhat familiar with Access and I like that it can show me
queries that show an overview of all my activity results via tables and
reports. I'm not familiar enough with Act to know if it can, as easily,
do the same thing.

I'd like to avoid having to completely learn Act! to make this
decision, so I'm hoping this newsgroup will turn up someone who is
familiar enough with one or the other and can map out which program(s)
will be the simplest solution while giving us all the info that we
need.

thank you ahead of time for reading and taking the time to respond.

RL

 

[Anonnymous]

You can not compare Act! and Office together. The better comparision is
between Act! and Outlook.
For a brief explanation please browse to the following link:
http://www.softwaremagician.com/actvsoutlook/
Let us know if this could answer your question.

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi Roxy Lee,

To add a bit to what Annonymous mentioned, be sure to check on which version of Act you're going to be getting (Act 2000 isn't
current and they redid the program after that) [it's bigger and somewhat slower] http://act.com Different versions of Act
work/don't work with differing versions of Word, in large part due to not really reworking the Act! side add-in that sends data to
Word.

For a job I did for a client last year, to do the features they wanted it was 100 extra hours of time charged just for getting
around the limitations of that add-in because they wanted to use the versions of Office and Act that they currently had.

There is going to be an investment in learning in either case. Act! is fairly easy to setup for forms and has all the linking for
database, reports and such internally handled pretty well so you can use that, while in Office you'd need to do a lot of that, but
you mentioned you're familiar with Access.

One other aspect is who is going to be able to maintain or modify what you create if you aren't there for a day, or because you take
another job (i.e. can it be maintained under either approach without someone starting over).

===========
I am setting up a new telemarketing office and I'm trying to make a
decision on whether to use Act! 2000 or Microsoft Office.

The biggest reasons for the dilema is that we desire the end results to
be completely electronic and be able to be emailed, with a link to
yahoo or mapquest, that link showing the location of the customer that
is referred to in the email. Secondly, we need reports to show
telemarketers and salespersons activity over periods of time.

Our steps:

We have an existing database of customers that contains the usual name
address phone, etc.

we contact these customers to set appointments. A person will go out
to see them based on the contact made by the telemarketer.

when we phone the customers, we need to track 3 things:
when they've been called,
who has called them,
the results (which can be a subset of 4 things: 1. an appointment was
set, they need to be called back at certain time, no contact was made,
or refused offer and don't call back.)

If an appointment is made, I need to send an email to a salesperson
with the customers information (name, address, phone, history....) all
of which are stored in the database. The email needs to include the
following appointment information: who made it, when it's for, and
especially the URL to a web page showing travel information (this is
all car info, not flight).

I currently cut and paste access info into a word document, add the URL
from mapquest, where I have to manually enter the address info, cut and
paste the word page into an email and send that email off to the
salesperson.

I'm somewhat familiar with Access and I like that it can show me
queries that show an overview of all my activity results via tables and
reports. I'm not familiar enough with Act to know if it can, as easily,
do the same thing.

I'd like to avoid having to completely learn Act! to make this
decision, so I'm hoping this newsgroup will turn up someone who is
familiar enough with one or the other and can map out which program(s)
will be the simplest solution while giving us all the info that we
need.

thank you ahead of time for reading and taking the time to respond.

RL>>
--
I hope this helped you,

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

Read about it, try it, or watch the movie
the 2007 Microsoft Office system iinfo is at
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