We were surprised by ACCPAC's well-designed work-flow engine and its inclusion of escalation and notification features. Escalation provides a method of ensuring timeliness of response to customers similar to procedures found in network-management systems. Midtier CRM products are rarely so complete.
We were also impressed with ACCPAC's reporting capabilities. All the products we tested offer enterprise-class reporting, internally or via Crystal Reports. And all but Microsoft include a version with the system. Soffront's and ACCPAC's reporting capabilities are flexible and based on user-customizable queries. Soffront's reporting functionality is built-in; ACCPAC users can choose built-in reports or Crystal Reports.
ACCPAC's base product includes a customer self-service portal that lets customers access the knowledgebase and interact with customer-service and sales representatives. Such a component, which Epicor and Soffront also include, is critical to a successful CRM solution. We were disappointed that the products from FrontRange and Microsoft lack this feature.
The only drawback to ACCPAC's application is its reliance on Excel to import data. Excel 2000 limits the number of rows in a spreadsheet to 65,536. Our test case, therefore, would require at least nine different Excel files to import our 600,000 customers and a whole lot more to import our millions of orders. Though the vendor said that this limitation can be alleviated by using Office XP, our testing showed that the limitation still exists within XP. In either case, we had to install Office on our server--something we really rail against doing. We greatly preferred to import a CSV or DBF, as the competition allows. ACCPAC says it is working on a version that will remove the Excel requirement and offer alternative methods of importing data.
ACCPAC gives users a well-designed GUI complete with an intuitive navigation scheme. Looking up a customer is a breeze and all relevant communication is conveniently attached to the customer for quick navigation among products, cases and detailed customer information. Users can personalize the dashboard, which offers information on recently viewed companies or customers and the user's task list. Likewise, users can configure a wide variety of preferences, such as a default search screen (with company, person and lead) and date and time preferences.
