Deepinder Goyal, the CEO of Zomato Ltd, announced on Tuesday that an employee has been reinstated. He refused to give his customer a refund since he didn’t understand Hindi.
A Tamil Nadu customs officer, @Vikas67456607, claimed on Twitter that he was denied a refund from Zomato because the customer was unable to communicate in Hindi.
The controversial reported dialogue was shared on that account by a tweet tagged with the company’s name and hashtags related to banning Zomato.
The employee was fired as a result of his failure to utilize his time wisely and for misbehaving with his customer.
On the microblogging site Twitter, the handler “@Vikash67456607” captured major Twitter backlash, with the hashtag “Reject Zomato” at the top.
Vikash had ordered food on Zomato and complained that an item was missing, and later took off with the controversy.
Vikas quoted “Customer care says the amount can’t be refunded as I didn’t know Hindi. Also, takes the lesson that being an Indian means I should know Hindi. He called me a liar because he didn’t know Tamil. Zomato (@zomato)It’s not the way you talk to a customer.”
In that case, the company apologized and issued statements in two languages, Tamil and English, expressing regret for the behaviour of its former employee.
Zomato stated, “We have terminated the agent for their negligence towards our diverse culture. The termination is in line with our protocols, and (the) agent’s behaviour was clearly against the principles of sensitivity that we train our agents for regularly.”
Learning from its faults. Further, it declares that Zomato is making development in the diverse language. It was building a Tamil version of its mobile app and had already localized its marketing communication in the local language in the state.
In the process of establishing a local Tamil call or support centre in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.
It added up to saying, “We understand food and language are core to any local culture, and we take both of them seriously.”
Goyal defended the employee, describing that the majority of people at the call centre are the young generation, “at the start of their learning curves.”
Goyal tweets, he said, “an ignorant mistake by someone in a support centre of a food delivery company became a national issue.
The level of tolerance and chill in our country needs to be way higher than it is nowadays. Who’s to be blamed here?”
We should cooperate with each other’s flaws and relish each other’s language and regional sentiments, he said.
“Tamil Nadu, we love you. Just as much as we love the rest of the country. Not more, not less. We are all the same, as much as we are different,” Goyal said.
“And remember, our call centre agents are young people, who are at the start of their learning curves and careers. They are not experts on languages and regional sentiments. Nor am I, BTW.”
“On that note, we are reinstating the agent. This alone is not something she should have been fired for. This is easily something she can learn and do better about going forward,” he concluded.
In an apparent reference to the controversy, DMK leader and the party’s Lok Sabha MP Kanimozhi said the customer care of some companies operates only in select languages.
Our country is a land of diversity, a land of different languages. And a company like Zomato has put up a message to remind us of the diverse version of the country where we must look into this, and make the sudden decision to move forward with their work in a different language. It was amazing.
