Press release

The Following is a Letter to CDK Global Customers from President and CEO Brian Krzanich

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The following is a letter to CDK Global Customers from president and CEO Brian Krzanich:

To our Customers:

It’s been a transformative first year as president and CEO of CDK Global. As I promised in the letter I wrote last January, we’ve been focused on cultivating relationships with you, because you and the success of your business are what matter most to us.

Thank you for welcoming me and my new leadership team into your dealerships. You graciously afforded us valuable time to better understand your needs. We stayed curious in our conversations to learn how CDK can make the right changes to deepen our relationships and strengthen your trust. With these learnings, we’ve made significant investments to change the way we do business. Many of you have shared that we are headed in the right direction. On behalf of all CDK employees, we remain fully dedicated to continuing this progress, and I am energized by how we are turning promises into realities for you.

EXPERIENCE

Our new Customer Experience organization is truly owning it. We added 100 advocates and performance managers to support greater than 60 percent of our customers and more are on the way. Our people are laser-focused on showing up for you at every step of your journey with us.

  • You can count on us to be there when you need us: We have expanded service hours by more than 42 percent, reduced phone wait times by more than 46 percent, and improved same-day resolution rates across all channels by 14 percent.
  • We are focused on helping you grow your business: We’re deriving valuable insights, using new dashboards to help you unlock productivity and profits and maximize return on your investment.

PROCESS & PRICING

We are modernizing our business by streamlining processes and systems:

  • We’ve taken the guesswork out of your bill: You told us our billing was complex and rigid, and we promised to make it flexible and drastically simplify it. The roll out of our new user-friendly invoice has begun and will be completed by the fall of 2020.

Our pricing model will be more transparent:

  • We are aligning our pricing to the value you place on our solutions: We have launched a new rewards program that brings a more transparent pricing structure and eliminates most third-party Partner Program data access fees for participating customers. This enables us to refocus on the solutions most important to you while offering better incentives, discounts and rebates across our portfolio of capabilities to help you sell more cars, parts and service.

INNOVATION

We are creating possibilities by making a commitment to simplify and modernize our technology, adopting an API-driven architecture with Fortellis and facilitating open and agnostic interaction across the industry:

  • We helped reduce costs, save time and give customer experience a lift: The popularity of our Hailer app continues to rise, with more than 600 dealers installed and 50,000 rides dispatched as of today.
  • We are driving toward being more open and publishing more APIs on Fortellis including launching a new API integration that will allow dealers to be more efficient in the service department, while increasing customer satisfaction and reducing wait times.
  • We are forging ahead on making our products more agnostic and have started certifying our applications for use with non-CDK DMSs.
  • We are strengthening our partnership with technology giant Microsoft, to accelerate innovation and advance digital transformation leveraging Fortellis.
  • We’ve worked hard to provide tools that enable CCPA compliance for all CDK dealers, not just those in California.
  • We continue to enhance our flagship Drive DMS while expanding our investment in Drive Flex. With more than 100 Flex implementations in the pipeline and additional OEM certifications expected, more dealers will be able to securely run their business from wherever they are in 2020.

A BETTER PARTNER FOR YOU

Earning your trust is paramount. We succeed when you do, and we are committed to transparency in the way we do business. In that spirit, I would like to address a misperception that I have heard from a number of dealers: CDK does not sell your or your customers’ data. We are committed to using the power of data to bring even more insights and value to you, but we are not and will not be data brokers. Providing a secure environment that ensures the safety and integrity of the information critical to your business is among our foremost priorities. This will never change.

Working with CDK will continue to get easier. Together with the investments we’ve made in 2019, CDK expects to spend more than $300 million over the next three years on technology and process innovation. We are also openly and actively working on ways to partner across the industry to better serve you. Your success is what drives us. What is best for you will always be at the heart of all of our decisions. We are making some exciting announcements this weekend at NADA that will further demonstrate our commitment to you and the industry.

We remain open to receiving your feedback because it will help us continue to improve. I am proud of the progress we have made in the last 12 months, but I know there is still a great deal of work ahead of us. We are working tirelessly to listen, and become the very best partner for you. Thank you for choosing CDK.

With gratitude,

Brian Krzanich

President and Chief Executive Officer

CDK Global, Inc.