UserVoice, the maker of customer engagement tools, today announced that it has raised $1 million in equity funding. The round was led by Baseline Ventures, with contributions from Western Technology Investment, The Accelerator Group, Tekton Ventures, Dharmesh Shah, Mike Davidson, Peter Lehrman, Shan Mehta, Aayush Phumbra, and Reza Hussein. The startup raised $800,000 of seed funding back in May of 2009, bringing total investment to just under $2 million.
According to Richard White, Founder and CEO of UserVoice, the startup’s products, like UserVoice Feedback (a hosted tool for gathering and prioritizing product ideas directly from a company’s customers) and Helpdesk, an easy-to-use ticketing system that lets companies solve more customer service problems in less time, have led to 75,000 signups and 40 million user interactions.
The San Francisco-based startup is growing rapidly, he said, so in order to support its growth, UserVoice is opening a new engineering office in Raleigh, North Carolina. “Being from Raleigh and very familiar with the wealth of engineering talent it was a natural fit to have an office there”, White said. With its new funding in tow, the startup is planning to build out its development, design, and sales teams over the next few months as well.
Since its founding in 2008, UserVoice has essentially become a hosted way for SMBs to intelligently process the feedback they receive from employees and customers through a social and game-ified idea generator, where they can suggest ideas, vote on others, and get quick feedback. It’s an effective way for software companies and web app developers to incorporate feedback tools into their product websites, extending feedback channels to give users an easy way to voice their thoughts on new features, roadmaps, etc.
Through products like Instant Answers, businesses can cut back on the amount of time they spend responding to customer questions and problems, as the tool pulls matching articles from companies’ knowledge base and instantly sends that info to customers to answer their product questions, etc.
UserVoice also offers widgets so that companies can get customer feedback directly from their websites, and iPhone SDK to embed a complete customer service solution with a single line of code, as well as a Facebook app so that fans can submit, discuss, and vote for ideas within the company’s Facebook page.
Companies like Seesmic, Posterous, Meebo, Miso, Rapportive, and HootSuite are currently using the startup’s customer engagement tools to streamline their customer relations and to diversify the ways in which they’re receiving feedback from their customers. (You can check out HootSuite’s integration of UserVoice’s feedback solution in the image below.)
For more on UserVoice plans and pricing, check them out at home here.
One additional note: UserVoice Founder and CEO Richard White, will be hosting a Fireside Chat on Monday, November 21st at 8:30 am PST, in which interested parties can ask the CEO questions about the funding round and what the future will look like for UserVoice.
UserVoice creates simple customer engagement tools that help companies understand and interact with their customers more positively and build customer relationships that last. With more than 90,000 organizations signed up and thousands of customers, UserVoice products include: UserVoice Feedback - a hosted tool for gathering and prioritizing product ideas directly from a company’s customers. UserVoice Helpdesk - a simple-to-use ticketing system that helps companies solve more customer issues in less time. UserVoice Full Service - a complete customer service solution that bundles...
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