After gathering feedback from clients, dealership software giant CDK Global is launching a new customer service model and says it will simplify its billing.
At the heart of the new effort, called Customer Success, is a dedicated team of advocates and performance management experts who will supplement the work already being done by existing CDK employees.
"What you're going to see is a complete change in how we think about the customer, how we're supporting them with more and more resources, aligning our hours to their hours — really opening up to what customer support and response really means to the customer," CDK CEO Brian Krzanich said Wednesday ahead of the NADA Show. The former Intel CEO took the top role at CDK in November.
As a start, CDK will expand its service hours by 30 percent to better match dealerships' hours of operations. The expansion will include weekends and most holidays. To support the initiative, the company will hire 100 new employees by the end of June, and 30 of those new staff members are already on board.
CDK is also introducing a new Customer Success Dashboard, which is meant to link a dealership's performance goals with system usage information. The new service model will include having a performance management specialist reach out to the dealership once a month to talk about statistics in the dashboard and how the store is performing. That person will also make three or four site visits a year.
CDK, which has piloted the Customer Success program with select dealers, plans to begin a full rollout midyear. It will be phased in for all customers with no charge for the new services.
The company also aims to clean up its billing system. While details were not immediately available, in a letter to CDK customers, Krzanich said, "I have seen the billing that you receive from CDK and understand how complicated it can be. We will materially fix it."
