Get Satisfaction raises $10M to go global with its social CRM

Social CRM company Get Satisfaction has raised a $10 million second round of funding.

The company’s online community customer-service platform lets brands create online communities where their customers can post questions, comments, and complaints about the company that the whole community can read. The brand can respond to posts directly, customers can respond to each other, and members of the community can rate the responses based on how helpful they are.

Get Satisfaction also enables companies to monitor mentions of their brand on Twitter.

“Much of the current discussion around social business today is about internal processes such as file sharing or employee collaboration,” said CEO Wendy Lea. “For Get Satisfaction, social business is about customers becoming active participants in every aspect of the business and creating tangible value on both sides of the relationship.”

As a Get Satisfaction spokesperson noted to VentureBeat, Lea, hired in 2009, “has experience on all sides of the industry: CEO, investor, mentor, board member many times over.” And as a co-founder at a company that was later acquired for $250 million, Lea is in a position to patiently lead Get Satisfaction toward a lucrative exit farther down the line.

“This isn’t the time to search for an exit,” Lea told VentureBeat. “We are just scratching the surface of what social can do in terms of delivering real, measurable value across work functions and industries. We’re witnessing the transition from ‘shiny tech toy’ to actual business solution.”

The latest funding round was led by InterWest Partners.

The four-year-old company has so far raised $20.9 million, including a $6 million first round last September and a $2.3 million seed round at the very beginning of 2010. InterWest general partner Bruce Cleveland will join the Get Satisfaction board of directors.

As Get Satisfaction continues toward that goal, the new funding will help to bolster the company’s product innovation, grow its distribution partnerships, and bring its offering to a worldwide audience with consumers of many languages and brands with international reach.

Currently, Get Satisfaction’s clients number 2,500 and range from tech darlings such as Zynga, Mint and Flipboard to multinationals like Procter & Gamble, Panasonic and Walmart.

[Disclosure: Get Satisfaction was founded by Thor Muller, who was formerly an advisor to VentureBeat.]