Think Like a Startup: App-chieving Smile Perfection
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APEX Insight: Facebook, Airbnb, Uber. These international companies, once startups, are transforming the way we travel. Airlines have taken note, fostering that entrepreneurial spirit in aviation. In this section of the multipart feature, we look at Japan Airlines’ app that trains flight attendants to flash a perfect smile.
How would you rate your smile on a scale from zero to 120 percent? That’s exactly what an app developed by Shiseido, a Japanese cosmetics company, aims to do. Last July, the company partnered with Japan Airlines for a three-month trial run to help more than 5,000 flight attendants perfect their smiling skills.
The app offers a more nuanced analysis than just a basic smile rating. Using facial recognition technology developed by Koozyt and Sony, and software backed by years of research on faces and facial expressions, in addition to a numerical rating, the app also evaluates the impression a smile may have on its recipient based on seven characteristics: trustworthiness, elegance, attractiveness, beauty, positivity, friendliness and liveliness.
“Even if you have a 120-rating smile, it doesn’t mean it’s the best smile,” a Shiseido spokesperson told Agence France-Presse. “For instance, a smile could be perceived as more elegant even when the overall rating is 80.”
To practice, you hold your device in selfie mode and flash the camera your best smile. Those intent on toning their visage can even partake in a daily smiling regimen, training their facial muscles based on the app’s analysis of their smile progress.
The trial on Japan Airlines complements the airlines’ omotenashi-imbued customer service philosophy. Loosely defined as selfless hospitality, the cultural practice of omotenashi throughout Japan involves a generous reception of guests and an attentive – even anticipatory – understanding of their needs. Fortune may not smile upon omotenashi practitioners who can only crack plastic smiles, but still, some observers have asked whether the app takes the hospitality philosophy too far.
After more fine-tuning, Shiseido, which also offers lectures on smiling techniques for schools and businesses, hopes to make the app available to the wider hospitality industry.
“Think Like a Startup” was originally published in the 7.1 February/March issue of APEX Experience magazine.