What is special about ACT! Hosting?

When it comes to effective customer management ACT! By Sage software is a name to reckon with. Uniquely designed to suite the small and mid-sized business, the CRM software helps to better collate customer information and administer customer interaction process. It plays a key role in integrating outlook regarding customer interaction and tracking as well. Customer management apart, the application is most suitable to collect customer information that will pave the way for effective marketing strategies, campaigns and will even boost inter-department collaboration; especially because, the software can easily be customized to meet your business requirements.

We live in the era of globalization, where even the small business houses have clients and staff spread over the world. The number of mobile workforce has seen an exponential growth in recent times, especially in sales and marketing. These people, consequently, need to have secure access to the applications and data at any time and from anywhere to carry out their job properly and on time. Confronted with the above challenges along with the need to reduce IT expenditure, business houses have come to realize the importance of cloud computing services, especially application hosting services. In an application hosting platform, both Software-as- a Service and Hardware-as-a-Service are included. The modus operandi of application hosting is that the ACT! Application is hosted by cloud vendors on terminal servers and is available over the Internet. In this model, there is no need to separately have all the network, IT infrastructure and hardware locally.

ACT! Hosting can thus transform an otherwise standalone in-house deployment of ACT! By Sage CRM into a more inclusive one. The benefits associated with ACT! Hosting can be attributed to the cost benefits, technological superiority, and enhanced productivity it brings to small businesses. Some of the major advantages of ACT! Hosting is:

Work from just about anywhere at anytime: ACT! Hosting, once and for all, removes the constraints typical to an in-house IT setup. Users can now get access to the data and applications residing on terminal servers, known for their fast performance, through any online connection and carry on with their work as usual. Users will be glad to know that they can access the application like any other desktop application. The high access is due to the fact that terminal server require low bandwidth at the users’ end.

No more upgrade related worries: A concern that occurs most of the time when you decide to install different versions and editions of ACT! By Sage CRM is system upgrades, as each one has its own system requirements. Evidently, you end up spending every time there is an upgrade. This framework gets an overhaul when availing Hosted ACT! Services as applications are installed and run on the terminal servers. Here the concept of upgrades is not as cumbersome as a local IT setup as service providers make provisions for upgrades at nominal prices. Users can, however, access the applications just like a local desktop interface.

Affordable IT support cost: ACT! CRM by Sage is hosted on third party servers and thus there is no need to have local network, servers, IT infrastructure and Hardware. There is also no need to have elaborated in-house security arrangements as security concerns are handled by the service providers; they have always-on IT Helpdesk support. Monitoring tools and trouble shooting mechanisms are in place for real-time elimination of online security threats. Users can get instant IT support team via phone, email or chat. Meanwhile, the user data is stored at a centralized data center and there are multiple data backups done on a daily basis to insure that there is no accidental damage or loss of data.

The security benefits and real-time support are part of the ACT! Hosting package and there is no additional cost involved. This way, there are huge financial benefits that cloud users can take advantage of.

Integrated Add-on features: Hosted ACT! CRM gives users a great deal of leverage when it comes to using different types of add-ons along with the ACT! CRM software. Integration of ACT! Add-ons with the application are more convenient when each one of them is hosted on terminal servers. Some of the ACT! Add-ons that can be integrated with ACT! CRM by Sage are ACT! Companion link, Scan IT, Address Grabber Suite, Extract for ACT!

Host ACT! CRM and other complementary application simultaneously: End-to-End CRM accounting benefits can accrue to users of Hosted ACT! CRM services as it can be integrated with Peachtree and QuickBooks accounting applications. Being hosted on terminal servers, the integration process is pretty straight forward and simple.

Overall productivity due to better collaboration: ACT! Hosting services help to better manage the sales and marketing team and improve the dynamic quotient of the entire administrative and management process. The hosted CRM software is instrumental in creating a collaborative face between the various departments and helps to perforate the customer information to all the stakeholders. This helps both the sales team and the marketing team to have a better customer perspective, which in turn makes it easier for them to create effective business and marketing strategies.