AI Teaching How to Smile Beautifully... Used in Employee Training at Japanese Major Companies

"Smile like this when you see customers"
Japanese retail company Aeon
Introduces AI 'Smilegun' for clerk smile and greeting training
Focus on improving customer service

A major Japanese retail corporation, which values customer service, is making headlines by actively utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) for training its store clerks.

Japanese retail giant AEON is introducing the world's first AI called 'Smile-gun' this month, which analyzes clerks' smiles and greeting attitudes and provides real-time feedback. Smile-gun evaluates over 450 facial areas and scores them on a 100-point scale when a clerk greets a customer during service. It also analyzes voice volume, pronunciation, and pitch in real time to assess the completeness of smiling expressions and vocalization.

Starting this month, 240 store employees at AEON can receive training from the AI Smile-gun. The company aims to implement Smile-gun in all stores by the end of this year and plans to award certificates of merit to employees with excellent training results. Employees' training scores are accumulated daily in the AI Smile-gun database, allowing real-time tracking of their progress.

Example of Smilegun usage released by Eon. (Photo by Eon Group)

Regarding the introduction of AI, AEON explained to the Japanese media ITmedia that "the frequency of clerks greeting customers has significantly decreased since COVID-19." They judged that it was necessary to train employees from the beginning on how to smile when interacting with customers. AEON added, "Smile-gun was developed as a tool for employees to actively experience, feel, and enjoy the training."

The reason AEON focuses so much on customer service is that offline sales have a significant impact on the company's overall revenue. AEON owns several large supermarket chains such as AEON Mall and Maxvalu, so offline stores account for a large portion of its business. Yuuki Hanyu, AEON’s Vice President, said, "AEON does not sell products but sells value," adding, "We are transforming AEON’s business model entirely to be customer-centered, ensuring customers can use all services without stress."

AEON has concentrated on improving the varying standards of clerks' smiles and vocalization during employee training. An AEON representative said, "During training, we found that some employees did not raise the corners of their mouths enough when smiling, had low voice volume, or poor pronunciation. The challenge was how to raise these to the company’s target level."

A staff member at Aeon practicing smiles using 'Smilegun'. (Photo by Aeon Group)

Before fully adopting AI for employee training, AEON conducted a trial at eight stores. Employees at these stores received 'smile training' from Smile-gun for 30 seconds every day after arriving at work. As a result, three months later, the rate of greeting customers with a smiling face and proper greetings increased by 1.6 times compared to before AI implementation. Currently, AEON is focusing the deployment of Smile-gun in stores with many new employees and newly opened stores.