Assistly raises $3M to manage customer complaints on Twitter and such

Assistly, a customer relationship management (CRM) software provider that specializes in social media, announced today that it has raised  $3 million in its second round of funding.

Assistly’s brand of CRM software mashes together pretty much every avenue of communication into a single Web interface. It includes traditional communication methods like email and phone calls. It then uses application programming interfaces (APIs) from social media services like Twitter and Facebook to directly feed that information into its website and combines it all into a single interface.

The web app lets users enter a number of tags and other keywords and crawls social media outlets to find people who mention them. That information is fed into a dashboard and Assistly users can quickly respond to questions or complaints about a service.

Assistly started in 2009 when co-founder Alex Bard and his team decided to take another crack at starting a company in the customer service space. It’s their fourth startup together, and the third that works with customer service. Their last company together, Goowy Media, was sold to Aol in 2008 — though the details of the deal weren’t disclosed.

“Our investors were pretty happy,” Bard said.

They pulled the idea of adding an analytics component to CRM software from their previous outing with Goowy Media, a company that designed web and desktop widgets and distributed them with an analytics suite, and ran with it. Assistly has picked up customers like web-based music streaming service Grooveshark and Twitter since launching the service in September last year.

Since then, Assistly has raised about $4.7 million with its most recent round of fundraising. The first round, led by True Ventures and Social Leverage, closed last year. Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures and investor Kenny Van Zant joined in the most recent round. The latest round took about two months to finish.

The company hasn’t had a marketing budget since its launch. The most recent round of funding will be used to actually help market Assistly and develop a sales force. It will also be used to “add more gasoline to the fire” and develop the analytics suite further, Bard said.

[Photo: The Next Web]