Our thoughts from under the tree.

Today we are launching the 1.1 release of BearHug.  There are a ton of new features and enhancements that are based on our own needs and from comments received from our early adopters.  Nothing delights us more than getting feedback from our customers and being able to solve their problems.  So many new ideas poured in that it was difficult to choose just exactly what was going to be in this release, but in the end, I think you’ll be very pleased.

1. Custom Domain Support – branding is everything and we want to make it easy to incorporate the BearHug functionality into your brand.  Instead of yourname.bearhugapp.com you can now use any domain you want!  Whether you choose myappsupport.com,support.myapp.com, or inside.mycompany.com, it’s as simple as telling us what you want and a little DNS change on your end.  Provisioning is immediate and you’re off to the races (note: this feature is only available on paid accounts).

2. Private Access – several people have indicated that they want to use BearHug in an internal setting so that the public cannot see the activity.  Whether this is for employee onboarding, intranet, training, internal products, or departmental use, we’ve got you covered!  Just change your settings to “private access” and a username and password will now be required to gain access (note: this feature is only available on paid accounts).

3. BearHug Dashboard – as we began to add more functionality and applications to the BearHug platform, we needed a place to summarize the action and give your customers a good place to get started.  Our new Dashboard provides that home.  In an upcoming release, we’ll give you the ability to have product-specific dashboards for that extra level of customization.

4. FirstRate App – a number of companies have proven that customers love to share feedback (positive & negative) and that prospective buyers are relying more and more on ratings and reviews to influence their buying decisions.  While a number of solutions exist for ecommerce and enterprise platforms, small businesses are being left out.  Today we’re adding FirstRate to our BearHug platform to make it simple for customers to provide ratings and review information on your products and for you to interact with them regarding their comments.

5. Team Profiles – a big part of BearHug’s philosophy is that we want your customers to get to know you.  To do that, we introduced the Team Profiles app.  This lets your team members (who opt-in to sharing) publish their photo, bio, social media links, email, blog, etc.  It’s all part of building lasting relationships with your customers.

6. Textile Formatting – plain text is boring and HTML can be hard for non-techies.  We found a compromise by implementing the Textile formatting system.  No clue what that is?  Don’t worry, with one click, we show you the styles available.  It has a learning curve of about 2 minutes.  You’ll be a pro in no time.

7. “Status” app is now “Pulse” – we realized that “Status” meant different things based on who was using BearHug and depending on their industry.  When we got down to the nuts and bolts of what the functionality really provided, we realized it was all about providing a Pulse of the organization.  Tadaaaa!

8. Product-Level Pulse Updates – if your updates are related to specific products or categories, you can now specify that during the update.  We’ll be adding some additional customization around this in the near future.  For now, this will get you rolling in that direction.

9. Huge Interface Enhancements – our last release was a little rough on the interface.  We had some time to get some additional love from our designer and overhaul some areas that needed attention.  You should see a much richer experience with cleaner navigation and clearer direction.  We’re not done yet, but this is a huge step forward.

10. Tags for Products – in our 1.0 release, we had one set of tags for an entire company.  This worked great until you had product-specific tags.  This was just plain wrong, so we changed it.  Now you can have tags related to “All Products” (such as billing, support, maintenance, sales, etc.) and specific tags for each product.

11. Custom Status Text & Labels – our original text and labels were pretty tech-centric.  This new release gives you the flexibility to change the recurring messages and text labels to anything you’d like.  Rather than saying, “24 hours of uptime” you can now say, “Nothing new to report” or whatever you’d like.  Don’t want to call it “Resolved / All Ok” you can now say “Green Status” or whatever floats your boat. Totally customizable in seconds and now perfect whether you’re a small software shop, a tackle shop, or NASA.

There are a number of other small changes, enhancements, improvements and bug fixes.  We believe that our 1.1 release shifts BearHug into high gear and we hope you agree.  Please share your thoughts by asking us a question or even better, by sharing a rating & review through FirstRate.

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