CDK Global
CDK]

To build a long-term, successful enterprise, you don't close a sale, open a relationship,” quotes Patricia Fripp, a reputed sales performance and a CRM expert. The essence of these words particularly resonates in CDK Global’s mission—to evolve the experience for automotive retail dealers and their customers all over the world. Standing true to their mission, the company helps automotive dealers run a profitable dealership through offering a complete picture of motorcar buyers and their preferences, inorder to connect with them at right time and right place. “Our innovative IT solutions are meant to start building personalized customer relationships and concoct a lifetime value out of them,” says Brian MacDonald, CEO of CDK Global [NASDAQ: CDK]. Incepted in 1972, CDK Global provides cutting-edge multichannel digital marketing solutions and Dealer Management Systems (DMS) for complete range of heavy equipment dealers including auto, truck, motorcycle, marine, and other recreational vehicles. The integrated solutions leverage scattered data to form meaningful patterns, predictable trends, and actionable insights to enable automobile dealers make decisions with confidence.

The company’s next-gen DMS, Autoline Drive improves dealership performance and helps attract more customers via reaching audience through myriad marketing channels including emails, telesales campaigns, and text messages. Autoline offers a suite of powerful features including interactivity, reporting, analytics, and 360 degree view of customer to make the challenging bits of running a dealership easier. The company’s end-to-end solution encompasses a range of ‘integrated, add-ons’ to reduce the need for third party applications and multiple software providers. “When a customer walks into the showroom, our Autoline instantly connects the CRM data with a mobile tablet to help service-attender pull all the needed information—in one fell swoop,” explains MacDonald. With all the important sales processes being carried out on tablet, both customer and the sales personnel experience an ease in capturing the buying criteria, trade-in evaluations, and deal approvals.

Our innovative IT solutions are meant to start building personalized customer relationships and concoct a lifetime value out of them

Besides refined user-experience, the Autoline’s date-triggered marketing campaigns, easy-to-use workflows, graphical user interface, and handy wizard revamps lead generation process and makes marketing easier.

In an implementation highlight, SERE Motors, a reputed dealer of SEAT and SsangYong cars in Northern Ireland, leveraged Autoline Drive to trace entire customer journey and improve its business. “Our client could actually see customer coming into the showroom, all the way through sales, invoicing, documentation, and delivery," extols the CEO. Yet in another case, several roadside garages also deployed Autoline to meet their rising volumes of business: from making checks on progress to monitoring vehicles and avoiding duplication in the invoicing.

Working under the roof of such unique innovation, the company puts forth its other solution—Computer- Telephony Integration (CTI)—that helps carry-out telephonic conversation with customers in an efficient manner. “Most of today’s customer interaction happens over the phone,” evinces Mac-Donald. He adds, “Our CTI turns the phone into a computer-aided sales machine to provide all the relevant insights to customer-executive during the call-handling time.” This enables staff to gain seamless integration across DMS, attain 5-star customer satisfaction, and make every call as effective as possible.

Moving forward, CDK Global aims to continue bolster its position as a global provider of integrated IT to automotive retail and the adjacent industries. “Our constant endeavor to utilize our latest and advanced research techniques to empower dealers will result in improved productivity and turn-over for them,” expresses the CEO MacDonald. With such bold ambitions steering the company, it looks MacDonald’s acuity to redefine automobile retail’s landscape seems at the brink of attaiment.