Utah-based startup Podium, an online reputation management company that bridges the gap between customer reviews and customer service, announced today a Series A funding round that raised $32 million.

Podium Corp. Inc.’s flagship product is a software as a service system that provides aggregation, analysis and management of customer reviews across numerous sites. This is done with a back-end dashboard that boils down insights from different online review sites and weights them according to customer impact.

Sites used by Podium can include general sites such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. or more industry-specific sites — such as Cars.com, a car dealership reviewer, or Healthgrades, a physician and hospital reviewer — depending on what is most meaningful for the business.

Businesses using Podium receive an at-a-glance look at the makeup of customer satisfaction as displayed on web review sites, but also get a chance to interact with unhappy (or happy) customers. With the platform and dashboard in place, customer service management can access and reply to reviews on sites that Podium aggregates directly from the software itself.

“Local business owners are very good at running their own business and talking to customers face-to-face,” said Podium Chief Executive Officer Eric Rea, “but many find it difficult when connecting with customers from the internet.”

Rea told SiliconANGLE in an interview that he used his father as an example of a local business owner who was great at in personal customer interaction. His father owned a local tire shop and excelled at providing customer service in the store, but found it problematic connecting with the constellation of services that took place online.

To help resolve this problem for business owners, Rea modeled Podium’s product to help automate bringing in online reviews and understanding those reviews to close the gap between a customer using online tools and face-to-face customer service.

The money from this funding round will go into Podium’s next product: Podium Messenger. The Messenger system, slated for launch this month, will enable businesses to interact with customers across familiar communication channels, such as text messages. According to Podium, the goal is to give businesses the power to consolidate customer interactions into a single platform and to make it easier for customer service to build and preserve meaningful relationships.

“Messenger is a product that will help businesses interact with customers online at scale,” said Rea. “The idea is to give businesses personalized interaction with every customer using common communication tools such as text messages. For the most part, this is handled automatically with the assistance of some artificial intelligence systems for simple interactions but if the platform cannot answer a question it passes the customer along to the business directly.”

Podium’s customer base has seen massive growth since 2014 and the company now boasts a customer roster that covers the U.S., totaling more than 10,000 businesses and 80,000 users. The company has also raised its own employee headcount to more than 175 people.

Rea said that growth is thanks in part to recognizing a critical need for companies to create and manage what Podium calls “an authentic story online.” He also said reviews are only one piece of brand management and the incoming capital will be used to develop further technology and tools to boost customer communication and insights.

“My hope is that the next time you take your car into the shop to have it fixed, instead of spending hours playing phone tag with the business, there will be a seamless online experience,” said Rea, speaking about the direction Podium wants to go with its tools and platform. “You will be able to check-in online for an appointment that morning, getting a Google map for directions to where you drop your car off. Later that day you get a text message or e-mail from the business outlining the repairs needed and a repair schedule. And then, when you come back later that night you have an easy way to pay from your mobile app and leave feedback or a review for that business as you pick up your car.”

Rea added that “so many things that we do online need to be real face-to-face interactions, but the process of going from online to face-to-face is broken right now.”

The funding round was led by Accel Partners, Google Ventures, Summit Partners and Y Combinator. Prior to this round, the company received $4 million over two seed rounds, bringing the company’s total funding to date to around $36 million.

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