Tyre storage: keeping track of your customers' wheels

Few services in a dealership are as predictable as tyre storage. The customer comes back, in the same weeks, every year. Whether it turns a profit comes down to order in the store room.

Why it is worth more than the fee

The revenue per customer is modest. The value is that you have an obvious reason to contact the same person twice a year, and that the car comes onto the forecourt where someone can look at it.

Tyre storage is effectively a subscription to customer contact. That is why it deserves running properly even though the line on the invoice is small.

What makes it go wrong

Almost every problem with tyre storage is the same problem: nobody is certain which wheels belong to which car. A notebook in the workshop works up to a point and then stops working, on one afternoon in October.

• Wheels with no link to a registration number.
• Tread depth last measured whenever someone remembers, but never written down.
• Customers who sold the car while their tyres stay behind taking up space.
• Nobody knowing what should be scrapped before the next season.

Set it up like this

• Tie every set to the registration number, not the customer's name. Cars change owners.
• Measure tread depth at every drop-off and keep the reading. It is both a safety argument and a sales argument.
• Record the exact shelf location. Hunting for the right wheels in a full store room is the most expensive quarter of an hour all year.
• Put an end date on the agreement, so tyres from a sold car do not sit there for three seasons.

The season starts before the customer calls

Whoever gets in touch first gets the booking. With a list of which cars are in storage, tread depth included, you can reach out in good time and offer new tyres to the ones who need them anyway.

That is the difference between staffing a queue in November and filling the calendar in October. The information is already in the store room, if it has been kept properly.