Before the rubber meets the road — literally — dealers can help their service customers feel confident they have enough tread on their tires. It’s through a new partnership involving a pair of technology companies.

Anyline, which offers artificial intelligence-powered mobile data capture and insights, recently announced a partnership with Fleetback, a digital ecosystem solutions provider for dealers.

Fleetback has integrated Anyline mobile scanning into its after-sales solution so dealers can collect tire sidewall and tire tread information.

Mechanics and service providers using Fleetback can now add smartphone-based tire inspections to their current workflow, ultimately increasing their ability to detect and convert additional tire-related services, and to sell more replacement tires.

Anyline’s technology leverages the tools dealerships already have in place — standard mobile phones and tablets — avoiding large investments in static drive-over tread scanning hardware.

“The more you know about your customers’ tires, the more accurately you can predict when they need to replace them,” Anyline CEO and founder Lukas Kinigadner said in a news release.

“We are very excited to partner with Fleetback to provide AI-enabled mobile data capture solutions to their automotive dealers to give them more insight into their customers’ tires and the ability to better service them when their cars are in the shop, and to predict when they need to come back in for tire replacements,” Kinigadner continued. “Fleetback’s partnership with Anyline will enhance automotive dealers’ ability to monitor tires, improve service and predict replacement needs.”

The companies acknowledged collecting tire sidewall and tread depth information for incoming vehicles being serviced can be time-consuming and manual entry can result in inaccurate data collection.

Now, dealerships using Fleetback can digitally capture and store information like a vehicle’s tire size, make, model, TIN/DOT numbers and tread depth data.

In the future, the customer could also collect this information in self-service check-in processes on their mobile devices.

“Transparency and trust are critical when customers take a vehicle in for service,” Fleetback CEO Fabian Motte said. “Bidirectional communication with unbiased information between the technician and customer helps establish that trust and leads to more cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

“Scanning and sharing tire tread information with customers helps them make confident decisions on when to replace worn tires and ensures they will continue to come back to your service bay for future repairs,” Motte went on to say.