Japanese supermarket chain AEON has become the first company to leverage AI to monitor the tone and demeanor of its customer-facing staff.
Created by InstaVR, the “Mr Smile” solution aims to gauge and standardize the smiles of customer service employees across AEON’s 240 stores.
The tool claims to be able to analyze over 450 elements, including facial expressions, voice volume, and greeting tone. The AI-powered program then uses this data to rate a customer-facing employee’s overall attitude.
Moreover, Mr Smile also contains a competitive game element that encourages staff to achieve higher scores by improving their attitudes.
In discussing the implementation of the new tech, AEON stated that it would help to boost customer experience:
[The goal is to] standardize staff members’ smiles and satisfy customers to the maximum.
Indeed, in a three-month trial conducted by AEON across eight of its stores, the supermarket chain reported that the attitudes of its customer service staff had improved by 1.6 times.
However, despite the positive trial feedback, the move raises serious questions about the morality of pressuring workers to express themselves in a particular way.
Sinister or Revolutionary?
While AEON has stated that its employees’ attitudes have improved, it does not specify if this information is garnered from the My Smile solution or from direct feedback from AEON employees.
This, in a nutshell, illustrates the issue of measuring customer service agents’ attitudes.
By pressuring agents to act in a particular manner that is deemed agreeable by the company, they are losing their individuality and freedom to express themselves as they see fit.
The inauthenticity that the solution encourages has drawn criticism from several unnamed Japanese customer service workers in a union survey.
“When the service industry workers are forced to smile according to a ‘standard’, it looks to me like another form of customer harassment,” one employee said.
