This Study Shows Whether 'Always Smiling' Attitude Is Right In Face-To-Face Encounters With Customers

Non-verbal communication plays vital role in face-to-face conversations. Success in business largely depends on establishing and maintaining relationships. Picard et al. (2009), conducted an experiment to examine the role of smiling in face to face encounters to establish relationship. In this experiment, service providers were asked to manipulate their facial expressions while interacting with customers. Two professional bankers were hired as service providers to explain financial services to 37 customers. Customers were told that their voice and face would be recorded for security reasons, but they were unaware of the fact that their facial expressions were being analyzed by researchers. 

Bankers manipulated their expression in following three conditions: In neutral conditions, bankers tried to put on a neutral facial expression; in smiling conditions, bankers tried to put on a smiling facial expression throughout the interaction; and in empathetic conditions, bankers tried to react with the same smiling or complimentary facial expressions. 

Customer satisfaction depends on how customers perceive attitude of service provider. It was found that the customer satisfaction was greater in case of empathetic conditions rather than neutral or smiling conditions. 

Customers perceived service provider as an empathetic, when they shared genuine smiles more often and for a longer time. This shows that giving complementary facial expressions and genuinely smiling together with customers helps to make customer’s experience more enjoyable. So, note down: The ‘always smiling’ attitude is not effective while closing your potential buyers.

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Reference – 
Kyunghee Kim, Micah Eckhardt, Nandi Bugg, and Rosalind Picard from MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames St. Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. 
Research paper name - The benefits of synchronized genuine smiles in face-to-face service encounters. 
Published In - International conference on Computational Science and Engineering (2009).

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A Study Shows The Effect Of Smiling On Trust Toward A Recommendation Agent

Trust is a significant factor in e-commerce businesses. Lui et al. (2010) conducted an experiment to determine whether smile of an online recommendation agent affects the trust of users. 

A recommendation agent is software that determines the preferences of users and recommends products and services in online shopping activities. 

Naturalistic avatar, a humanoid in form of human-like appearance, was used as a recommendation agent in this study. The trusting beliefs were decided as ‘competence’, ‘integrity’ and ‘benevolence’. An experimental website was developed for shopping a laptop by participants. They were told that they were supposed to choose a laptop for a friend who does not know much about laptops. Before making a choice, they interacted with a recommendation agent.

After making a final choice of laptop, the conclusions were drawn. The smiling agents were perceived as more competent than non-smiling agents; while smiling agents were not perceived to have higher integrity and more benevolence than non-smiling agents. 

The trust can be built using facial expression of a recommendation agent. So, while designing avatars as recommendations agents for websites, design a smiling agent to interact with people. It will make them believe they are interacting with competent avatars who recommend them a better product.

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Reference - Siu Man Lui, School of Business (Information Technology), James Cook University, Cairns, Australia. And Wendy Hui, The University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China. 

Research paper name - Effects of Smiling and Gender on Trust toward a Recommendation Agent.

Published in - International Conference on Cyberworlds (2010)

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This Study Reveals How Smiling Helps People to Remember You For A Long Time

A smile consists of two differentiating periods of motions of mouth - neutral to smile and smile to neutral. Ning et al. conducted a study to determine discriminating power of a smile based on these two periods of motion. 

Landers et al. proved that people are more likely to recognize faces from real smiles than fake smiles as well as from moving images than static images of smiles. Using this conclusion, Ning et. al., prepared a video database of 30 to 40 video clips of 10 subjects. Each subject performed smile expression as naturally as they could. The expression begins with a neutral face, goes to smile, and from smile to neutral face again. 

After examining the features generated from neutral to smile and smile to neutral periods of motions separately, they found that both give the same information about identity. 

This implies that the discriminating power of smile based on neutral to smile and smile to neutral periods of motion is same. Motion doesn’t matter to people; what matters is whether they go flat on charm in your smile when your expression goes from neutral to smile.

A human face contains a lot of information about identity. In further investigation, they tried to know which part of face is more discriminating. As features were generated from smile dynamics, error rates of lower face and upper face were compared separately. 

They found that lower face is 3 times more discriminating than upper face. So, if you want people to remember you for a long time, smile more.

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Reference - Ye Ning, Terence Sim. School of Computing, National University of Singapore. Research paper name - Smile, You’re on Identity Camera. Published in - IEEE (2010)

Reference – K. Lander, L. Chuang and L. Wickham. Research paper name – Recognizing face identity from natural and morphed smiles. Published in – The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)

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