How to leverage your tire data to increase customer loyalty
The average customer replaces their tires about every two and a half to three years. In the meantime, most think little to not at all about them. When the time comes to purchase new sets, it’s important for tire retailers to be there for their customers and answer their needs perfectly.
We spoke with Von Brady from Discount Tire, the world’s largest independent tire dealer, about what best practices they are using to consistently engage with customers, and how mobile data capture can play a big role in building up customer loyalty.
To get her insights, read the article below, or listen to the full interview with her on this episode of our podcast, The Auto Tech Show!
A lack of accessible data hurts tire dealer businesses
Having the right information about a customer and their vehicle is the first step to improving your customer loyalty. The problem that exists for many independent dealers is that most of the data collected during sales or service is handwritten, and might not even be stored by the dealership.
“Understanding our top customer’s true needs has been difficult because of the lack of easily accessible maintenance data such as tread depths, tire age and mileage”, Brady told us.
Tire technicians used to collect information with pens and pads, and in most cases, the handwritten data was either given to the customers to take away from their visit or stapled to a customer invoice and archived.
The challenge of tire data collection
Von also insisted that “the pain points are the data collection, management, and utilization. Without those capabilities, it’s difficult to really know [their] customers and their true needs.” This means that like every dealer, Discount Tire were “challenged with keeping customers engaged between the tire buying or service experiences.”
When collecting tire data with pen and paper, two main factors make it highly inefficient to generate customer engagement and retain their loyalty:
Human errors are inevitable
There are many challenges to recording tire data and sharing it within a dealer’s network.The human factor is one of the main. Human errors, such as typos or mistakes when transcribing tire information play a big role and can lead to as many as 40% of all DOT records being invalid, and thus useless.
These errors are mainly due to the fact that DOT codes or tire size codes are long series of characters, often transcribed in an environment of poor light, dirt, grease and dust, by technicians pressed for time.
Tire data collection is hugely time-consuming
The average time to locate and record TINs from all four tires of a vehicle was 2 minutes and 43 seconds. This can be even longer if the data points are facing inward, meaning the technicians need to type it in a system afterwards.
This is time spent by technicians that cannot be used to perform other tasks that add true value for dealers nor customers.
Why tire maintenance data is a must have for customer loyalty
With tight margins and stiff competition, Brady and the team at Discount Tire looked to their data to answer the question of how they could stay relevant to consumers between purchases and services. By integrating a fast and easy way to capture tire data, they found new opportunities to bring value to drivers when other companies fall off the radar.
“With this new technology, we’re able to collect and manage customer vehicle data in a way that provides real customer and business value. We have the ability to reach customers in a timely manner, delivering information about their distinct tires, as well as personalizing offers for new products.“
When a tire dealer has the right information at their disposal, it becomes much easier to take action to build up customer loyalty:
- With tire tread depth and DOT codes, a tire dealer can foresee replacement opportunities.
- With the tire size code, they are able to select models of tires that are a perfect fit for the customer’s vehicle.
This translates into an offer that is well timed, and well targeted. And not only that, it also shows customers that their tire dealer or service provider knows exactly what they are looking for and when they are looking for it. This helps to build a solid relationship and improves customer satisfaction along the way.
How mobile data capture comes into play
A solution for tire dealers to efficiently digitize maintenance data is mobile data capture. Mobile data capture uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to get the information directly from the tire sidewall, and digitize it instantly.
And the benefits of a tire size scanner can be enormous for tire dealers:
- It’s digitized – with mobile data capture, the data is directly digitized and can be sent to a central database to which every store can connect. It doesn’t require technicians or employees to type in the information, which would be an additional risk for mistake and a waste of their time.
- It’s very fast – a tire technician can scan the tire size of each set of tires in a few seconds.
- It’s accurate – a tire scanner won’t make the mistakes a technician will eventually do.
Mobile data capture also gives useful tools to increase customer engagement at every step of the tire life. At Discount Tire, they used their digitized maintenance data to “provide service reminders for such things as tire rotations, air pressure checks, or to make an appointment with their local store so they can schedule any tire service need they may have.”
How to integrate mobile data capture into maintenance and loyalty programs
Integrating a tire data scanning solution to your existing processes is made easy with Anyline’s software development kit (SDK). The technology can be integrated into your app or software, and works on any standard smartphone, ruggedized device or camera-enabled TPMS device running on Android, iOS and UWP, as well as popular platforms like Xamarin, React-Native, Cordova and Flutter.
It can record many types of information, such as DOT code, tire size, as well as VIN and licence plate. And you don’t need to invest in new mobile devices, as it can be integrated on your existing ruggedised devices, TPMS or even technicians’ own smartphones.
If your organisation is aiming to add mobile scanning into its existing software infrastructure, the best first step is to request a 30-day free trial of our software development kit (SDK). With this, you will be able to quickly test out the technical capabilities of OCR for your needs.