WEST, Texas — "I tried to sign on to the system and of course, it didn't come up," said Ron Sykors, owner of Sykora of West.
Little did the owner of Sykora of West know that this would be a week of adjustments for him and his staff.
"So I talked to our IT guy and he said yeah they're down system-wide. It wasn't really all that unusual because sometimes systems go down whether it's Ford's system, CDK's or whoever but this time, it's like nah this is gonna be down for a little while," said Ron.
And he was right.
Sykora of West experienced something out of its control, a national cyberattack. Hackers broke into the CDK Global System, software that dealerships like this one use to access customer information.
To protect customers' privacy CDK shut down operations. Ron tells me they quickly revamped to serve the community at hand.
"Our young guys figured out things that we used to have to do hey you write things down. While we can't print out a form right now we're using standardized forms or handwriting or hand typing those things," said Ron.
While Ron tells me he hasn't seen any impact on sales, he admits it can be a little weird asking customers questions they typically wouldn't have to ask.
"And we're doing a little more of, 'Oh yeah by the way what's your phone number?' when people call because a lot of times we may already have that information," said Ron.
When I asked Ron if they'll still meet their quota of sales for the month here's what he told me:
“Yeah we like to listen to hit the numbers but you know what it all comes down to are people are more important than numbers and our customers are important than numbers," said Ron.
