If you have have not heard about it yet, you will in the future. IOT is the Internet of Things. Basically this is all the equipment, appliances and cars out there in the world that can access the internet. The reasoning behind this is a good one - maintenance of appliances and vehicles, systems to turn them on and off, etc.  However, they have now become a great back door for Denial of Service (DOS) attacks. Last week, DYN, one of the main DNS server hosting companies was down because of a

Our newsletter theme this month is giving thanks (appropriate with November right around the corner). Each of us was challenged to create an article about gratitude, thankfulness, and how to say we appreciate our customers. Since I love social media, I decided to focus on that and how it can help you engage your customers and provide a way to say thanks. Companies talk all the time about maintaining loyalty from their customers but I think they tend to forget it's a two-way street.  Yes,

Successful businesses have figured out how to use their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to foster relationships with prospects and clients. Building these meaningful relationships starts with: Learning about your clients – professionally and personally through dialogue and on social media Adding pertinent data to your CRM And, finally, taking action Here are six ideas for using Act! to add a personal touch to your client interactions and show gratitude to them for their

Make using your Act! database easier for your users. The easier it is to use, the more your people will use it. Training can help them build strategies and teach shortcuts, but you should take away the guessing and additional typing as much as possible. Here some things you could do: Ensure that your users can choose most of their standard responses from dropdowns rather than having to type the information each time-especially in the history regarding. Create templates for those often

I recently worked with a client who had a CRM at their organization but they were using it as a glorified rolodex.  When I asked them why they had not taken the product to the next level, they asked me why should they? They wanted to know the benefits. Keeping track of your customers is one way to guarantee more sales. It's such a simple thing. Understand what they want, advise them on what's available, offer them good pricing and support, and you make sales. However that assumes you've

Got Windows 10?  Act! Not Starting?  Try this! We have been getting quite a few calls lately from clients who are finding out the hard way that their operating system just got upgraded to Windows 10. Well isn’t that nice? Microsoft is now making it happen automatically and many are getting caught of guard.   What to do?  Turn off automatic updates in Windows for one.  If Windows 10 is here, then time to upgrade Act!.  The latest version of Act! is designed to

ACT for the Web is a pretty cool application. It is a great way to access your ACT data from a browser which is convenient when you are not near your main computer. In the process of working with the tool, we’ve found a few tricks and recommendations on improving the installation and performance. I wrote it up in a document and thought I’d post it here as a blog article. Note – this is going to be long but the idea is you can reference it later or print it for future review. Overview The

Microsoft announced the release of Windows® 10 on July 29, 2015. Upgrading to Windows® 10 introduces many new features, some of which may affect Act!. We highly recommend performing a complete backup of your Act! database prior to upgrading to Windows, though Act! v17.2 and later are compatible and are fully supported.  ACT v18 has full support for Windows 10.  The following is to assist you if you are running older versions. Important Notes: Technical support from Swiftpage