The cloud, your clients, and streamlining business. That’s what BearHug is all about, with a new customer care platform built to offer a more hands-on approach to team-management and customer service. Created by the same team behind budURL, BearHug is part of a growing network of management tools from Live Oak 360.

Centering its entire platform around customer care, its tools take a full-circle approach to its service. For instance, a support ticket from a customer ca be handled more like a discussion, with BearHug offering ways to engage around it. Talk with the customer or another team member, as BearHug places the necessary tools to drive action around a given customer care issue. This prevents things from falling through the cracks as they pertain to both the client-facing side as well as the team’s management.

BearHug is really a custom tool to be used any way a business sees fit–it doesn’t have to be used to talk directly with customers, or for the back-end communication methods amongst team members. It’s configurable, with polls, real-time stats, topic-tracking and more. Using this data, BearHug can also offer a bit of introspection to a team as they handle support tickets, metrics and overall utilization of resources.

What this does is enable a team to streamline their efforts by combining the care, research and bug-fixing in a single feedback loop. From Bearhug,

“We are taking engagement from a one-way pipeline, to a round trip process that includes relationship management, collaboration, and the creation of an evergreen customer knowledge base. It all boils down to — is customer care just a requirement, or an opportunity to differentiate? Can customer care even be a profit center instead of a cost center?”

The holistic approach, as appealing as it is to customers, is even more beneficial to the business itself. Learning from the interactions with customers, BearHug creates the mechanisms through which multiple aspects of a business’ weakness can be actively turned into a beneficial experience.

Competing with the likes of Salesforce Service Cloud and GetSatisfaction, BearHug has a bit of an uphill battle. Large data cloud services are rolling in customer care features as add-ons, or using them as their starting point towards growth. The need to be able to handle customer feedback, as fragmented as it can become, is a process that needs to be as effective as possible. Keeping the productivity and educational benefits close to the business is a point of differentiation for BearHug as it prepares to launch its new site.

BearHug is currently in private beta. Be one of the first 1,000 users to register with the code: siliconangle.