Can AI teach you to smile? Japan's firm uses it for customer satisfaction

Japan's supermarket chain AEON has introduced 'Mr Smile' to accurately assess employees' service attitudes based on facial expressions, voice volume, and tone of greetings

In recent years Artificial Intelligence has increasingly impacted various sectors, including workplaces, education, and entrepreneurship. Japan is taking it further by integrating AI into its customer service strategy to perfect the ‘art of the smile’.

According to a report by the South China Morning Post, Japan’s supermarket chain, AEON, has introduced ‘Mr Smile’, an AI system designed to standardise and enhance the smiles of its employees.

On July 1, AEON announced that it is the first company globally to use a smile-evaluating AI system across its 240 stores nationwide.

How does ‘Mr Smile’ AI work?

The AI system, named ‘Mr Smile’, was developed by Japanese tech firm InstaVR. It is designed to accurately assess shop assistants’ service attitudes based on over 450 factors, including facial expressions, voice volume, and tone of greetings.

 

Incorporating game-like elements, the system encourages staff to improve their scores and, consequently, their service attitudes. AEON reported that a three-month trial involving 3,400 employees in eight stores resulted in a 1.6-fold improvement in service attitudes, according to SCMP.

Complaints of harassment by employees

However, this initiative has raised concerns about increasing workplace harassment, particularly from customers—a significant issue in Japan known as ‘kasu-hara’, where employees face abusive language and repetitive complaints, the report claimed.

According to a survey conducted by Japan’s largest union, UA Zensen, nearly half of the 30,000 service industry workers surveyed reported experiencing customer harassment.

The report cited critics as saying that forcing service industry workers to adhere to a standardised smile could constitute another form of customer harassment. Some respondents expressed that smiles should be genuine and heartfelt, not commodified, and that using a machine to standardise smiles seems impersonal and impractical.

Similar approach in Japan’s McDonalds

This approach has been compared to McDonald’s Japan’s ‘Smile zero yen’ initiative, where ‘Smile’ has been listed on menus since the 1980s, priced at ‘0 yen’ to emphasise that smiling costs nothing. However, this concept has faced scrutiny in recent years for potentially adding stress to employees who are already among the lowest-paid in the country.

In response to these concerns, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare published guidelines against customer harassment in 2022, encouraging companies to uphold service standards without compromising staff well-being, SCMP said.

A recent initiative in a Fukuoka prefecture supermarket, introducing an extra-slow checkout counter for elderly and disabled customers, received positive feedback. This measure, allowing customers to take up to 20 minutes to check out, resulted in a 10 per cent sales increase despite a lower number of customers.