Customer centricity: The Rakuten Symphony approach

Customer centricity refers to beliefs, ideas and values that place the customer at the core of everything we do. This means the customer remains the focal point for all our products, deliveries, and services at Rakuten Symphony.

Customer centricity has evolved to the point where we now need to predict requirements that customers themselves might not be aware of.

“Our whole role in life is to give you something you didn't know you wanted. And then once you get it, you can't imagine your life without it.”

-Tim Cook, CEO of Apple

At Rakuten Symphony, customer centricity is part of our culture and not a strategy. One of the critical elements of building this culture is co-innovation with our customers.

We are customer obsessed; whether it is about launching a new feature or partnership, we ensure that it helps our customers in co-innovating.

So, what are the key pillars of having a customer-centric approach?

1. Understanding and predicting customer requirements: Listening to customers means hearing and understanding their business goals, priorities, pain points, etc. Creating a product, feature or solution comes next.
2. Building Customer Success Culture across organization: This means everybody, from the CxO to everyone in the field, lives and breathes customer-centricity and is obsessed with making it a success.
3. Co-innovating with the industry: We consistently engage with customer teams to co-innovate on our products and services. This means going the extra mile to ensure we help our customers exceed their business goals and objectives, and become partners in their success. We are actively driving and co-innovating on key industry cloud-native and open source initiatives such as Telecom Infra Project, O-RAN Alliance, Open RAN Policy Coalition and Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
4. Democratizing Data: Traditionally data has been stored in silos, whereas within Rakuten Symphony, with our Symworld Platform and common data lake, we ensure that data is integrated and easily accessible across the organization. In line with our CEO Tareq Amin’s vision, we aim to revolutionize the telecom industry through empowerment and innovation; in that journey, the customer will consistently be our number one priority.
5. Building Innovation Labs: Innovation is always at the heart of all our products. We are developing products keeping in mind the requirements that exist today and the requirements that we predict for the future. With this vision, we are creating innovation labs and experience centers at strategic locations to demonstrate to our customers our cutting-edge products. One of the latest innovation labs has been announced in the UK, while we have also introduced a new Rakuten Symphony Global Innovation lab in India.

Conclusion

At Rakuten Symphony, we will continue to put the customer first in everything we do. Our innovative approach means collaborating with our customers to ensure we are solving their most pressing problems and introducing solutions that will add value to their business.