Editor’s Note: This letter has been edited according to the AP Style guide.
To Our Customers:
Since joining CDK Global two months ago, I’ve spent much of my time meeting with some of you to better understand your needs, how well we have been meeting those needs, and where we have opportunities to improve. As a result of these discussions, we have begun aligning our organization and making changes to ensure we focus on fundamentals that are vital to helping your business grow.
Under my leadership, I want you to know that we are making bold changes and significant commitments. CDK is dedicated to being a better partner and technology leader for you. In practical terms, this means taking immediate action to accelerate innovation while becoming more customer- and solution-focused. We made a number of announcements while at NADA in San Francisco related to these commitments. As we forge a new path together, you can expect that CDK will:
- Show up for you. We announced a dealer-centric service model called Customer Success that is unique to the industry. At its core, this service model is designed with your success in mind, and will be offered at no additional cost to you. It features an entire organization of specialists (Customer Success Advocates) who will proactively help you gain needed insights about your business from a new data dashboard and engage with you during key milestones to ensure the service you receive is nothing short of best-in-class.
- Expand our support hours to align with your hours, including weekends and most holidays. This 30 percent increase in service team availability means you can rely on us to be there to help you any day of the week.
- Accelerate our investment to bring Drive Flex to more dealerships of all sizes in the near future. With full DMS capabilities and an improved user interface, this is the solution many of our dealers have been looking for to help them optimize their businesses for greater success. Operating on web-based architecture, the Drive Flex DMS is designed to help you reduce infrastructure costs while providing greater operating flexibility. I have taken a close, code-level look at this next generation technology and Drive Flex delivers on the promise to modernize the DMS.
- • Foster frictionless innovation. The Fortellis Automotive Commerce Exchange platform is growing, and we are making enhancements so it can continue to serve as the innovation hub for retail automotive technology, including removing all developing and publishing fees. The Fortellis Marketplace, where technology providers can market their software applications, became the latest enhancement. In addition, an advisory board consisting of industry members is being added to ensure Fortellis continues to be an open and agnostic technology platform observing good governance.
- Add value and flexibility. Over the next year, we’ll be making additional changes to make doing business with CDK easier, including providing you with more flexibility, pricing predictability and transparency.
- Simplify billing. I have seen the billing that you receive from CDK and understand how complicated it can be. We will materially fix it.
Under my leadership you will see change at CDK, and these are my commitments to you. I know actions speak louder than words, but you can expect nothing less from us. Thank you for your business. We look forward to strengthening our partnership and being by your side to help you create great experiences for your customers.
Sincerely,
Brian Krzanich
President and Chief Executive Officer
CDK Global, Inc.