CDK Dealership Xperience: Made for a Fast-Moving World

I was flipping through movies to watch recently and happened upon Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And as I chuckled remembering the characters in that film – Ferris, Cameron, Principal Rooney – I thought about one of the most famous quotes from that movie.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

When it comes to the automotive industry, I think we can all agree that life has moved pretty darn fast – especially when it comes to technology. In fact, over the years a number of companies, including CDK Global, have pushed the envelope to develop solutions quickly across every part of the dealership.

But when I returned to CDK, it was apparent to me that perhaps it was time to take some advice from Mr. Bueller and stop to “look around.” We’ve been on the road talking to dealers, listening, and it’s clear their issues haven’t disappeared. In fact, consumers are as frustrated as they’ve ever been with car buying and servicing. Dealers are seeing their satisfaction scores drop. Retaining current employees and recruiting new ones has never been more difficult. Operations are less efficient.

It’s apparent the traditional DMS is no longer enough if a dealership wants to increase operational efficiency AND increase consumer satisfaction. This has pushed dealers to bolt on piecemeal solutions around the DMS. But these solutions often don’t talk to each other. As a result, these broken, unintegrated solutions and workflows have created almost a digital triage – which by the way is costing dealerships tens of thousands of dollars a month.

In short, it’s an inflection point for our dealers and ourselves. But doing more of the same isn’t the answer. Another point solution doesn’t address the bigger issue – which are broken workflows across the entire operation. These individual, unintegrated point solutions are creating operational friction for dealership employees and ultimately experiential friction between the dealership and consumer.

We need to bring the consumer and dealership employee experiences together to change and simplify how the dealership operates. The answer goes beyond one solution. The answer lies in delivering a new category of software that bridges the deep functionality needed to run the business while being able to seamlessly connect to the consumer. The answer is the CDK Dealership Xperience.

Simply put, the CDK Dealership Xperience unifies workflows across the dealership so that you’re running your operations better WHILE also delivering the optimal consumer experience. No more swiveling from solution to solution. No more consumers frustrated that the dealership has no record of the information they’ve already provided online.

Core to the platform is the Foundations Suite. This Suite extends the ability for dealers to operate their entire business on one platform while increasing control over the consumer’s retail journey digitally from start to finish. It includes our most popular technology found in our DMS as well as highly sought features for service and modern retail as well.

The Foundations Suite is available to our current DMS customers now. And, because of the value we place on our loyal users, we are granting them access to this new suite at time of renewal. We will also implement it for our current customers free of charge upon contract renewal.

Because we know dealers want to arm their teams with even more transformational functionality across their workflows, we have developed three tailored suites to boost their business to another level.

The Modern Retail Suite offers simplified workflows that provide a flexible consumer experience with control over their own buying path—from online to showroom and back again.

Comprehensive, deeply integrated service functionality is found in the Fixed Operations Suite that will elevate the consumer’s experience throughout the entire repair process.

Finally, the Intelligence Suite features powerful tools infused with advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to assist dealers in accessing personalized and configurable enterprise reporting and turning data into profitable business decisions.

This new category of software is something that only CDK can provide. We have decades of experience and intellectual property that we’ve applied across every part of the dealership. It also gives us a commanding edge over the competition attempting to build solutions on the backs of dealers rather than with them. We know these new entrants are getting attention, and we take them seriously. But hype doesn’t always mean substance – and results.

The CDK Dealership Xperience enables dealerships to instantly benefit from our collective experience utilizing industry best practices and longstanding business rules to drive their business forward with confidence and minimal disruption to their operations. And it will strengthen our dealers’ connections to their OEMs, independent software vendors and consumers.

No one wants to see dealers succeed more than us, and the last thing we want to see is a broken workflow keeping you from reaching that pinnacle. As I said before, life for all of us is moving pretty fast – and I hope you’ve taken a well-deserved day off like our friend, Ferris. But stopping to take a look has allowed CDK to deliver a new approach … an approach we don’t want you to miss.