Advertisement feature from Anyline
The first MOT is where dealers keep or lose a customer. The deciding factor is often a worn tyre the customer never gets to see.
Tyres are one of the top reasons a car fails its MOT, and one of the biggest sales dealers keep missing.
Both come to a head three years in: the first MOT lands, for most brands, in the same month the warranty runs out. The customer’s next service is the first they have ever been free to book elsewhere, and their tyres, three years and twenty-odd thousand miles in, are usually due. Whether they come back next year is decided there.
The first job to leave
Own the tyre and you keep the customer; lose it and the rest tends to follow. Tyres are the first job a customer takes elsewhere: flagged at the service, turned down on the day, and a few weeks later fitted by a fast-fit that now has a reason to see that customer again. A flagged tyre is a sale with a short shelf life; someone will fit it within weeks, and the only question is who.
Too often it is someone else’s, and price is only part of the reason. Fast-fits are where people buy tyres, the way supermarkets are where people buy milk: open at the weekend, fitted while the customer waits, no booking needed. What the dealer has is the first look, the worn tyre right in front of a technician months before anyone else sees it. The customer sees none of it. They are in the waiting area or back at work, and what reaches them is a gauge reading and a bigger bill. Most say “not today” and leave on the same tyres.
Show the customer what the technician sees
TireBuddy, from Anyline, puts the worn tyre in front of the customer with nothing more than a smartphone. The technician sweeps the phone across each tyre and the app measures the tread at more than 100,000 points, maps the wear and gives a reading to within 0.5mm.
What the customer gets is a visual report they can follow without help: each tyre marked replace or monitor, and the tread depth translated into braking distance. Tell a driver their tread is at 2.5mm and they nod. Show them how much further the car now takes to stop and they tend to say yes on the spot.
Built to fit the workshop
With TireBuddy the same phone does the whole job. It starts with the number plate or VIN, so the report is filed against the right car, then reads each sidewall for brand, model and size, so the tyre itself is identified too.
The inspection runs the same way no matter who does it, which means an apprentice and a twenty-year technician hand over the same report and every site in a group checks tyres to the same standard. There is no kit to buy and nothing to install: it runs on the phones technicians already carry, as an app on its own or inside the software the workshop already uses, and a national network rolls it out the same way one site does.
Anyline’s technology ran more than 100 million tyre inspections last year. One leading Toyota dealership, 22 technicians, had been checking tread with a gauge and writing it down on a sheet for years. They put TireBuddy inside the system they already had, and the first thing they mention is the customers. “Our customers can see a clear picture of the condition of their tyres,” the dealership’s technical consultant says. “Being able to present that information in a simple, understandable way has made our customers noticeably happier.”
Make the first look count
Somewhere around the first MOT, a customer decides whose customer they are, and the tyres are usually the first thing they decide it on.
The dealer has the car, the technician and the worn tyres in one place that day, and the customer is in the building too. They just never see the tyre, and a report on the desk in front of them is all it takes to change that.
That report already exists: see what it looks like in your customer’s hands, and start a free trial in your own workshop.