WIthin hours of terminating one of their customer service agents for teling a customer that Hinid is our national language, Zomato's founder, Deepinder Goyal announced that the employee has been reinstated again.
He acknowledged that it was an ignorant thing to say, but also pointed out that it was not enough to rid her of her job. He wrote, "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 also talked about how many customer service agents were young and didn't know much about religious and cultural sentiments. He also mentioned that the tolerance level in the country needs to be much higher than it is now. He ended by saying, "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."
Check out his entire tweet here:
Here is what happened before Deepinder's tweet:
Zomato faced backlash on Twitter after a customer shared their experience with the app's customer service agent.
Vikash, a user from Tamil Nadu, was facing an issue with his order and decided to take it up by chatting with the customer service agent on the app. In screenshots that Vikash has posted on Twitter, it is seen how he is unable to get his refund due to a miscommunication between the app and the restaurant.
The agent explained that this was happening due to a "language barrier" to which Vikash replied saying that they should have sent someone who knew Tamil. To this, the she said, "For your kind information, Hindi is our national language. So it is very common that everybody should know Hindi little bit."
Not only was this statement factually incorrect since Hindi is not our national language, but is was also a hurtful thing to say, something Vikash pointed out in his tweet.
Users on Twitter have agreed with him and supported him while calling out Zomato for the behaviour of their employee. Soon enough, #RejectZomato started trending on Twitter with many users saying how this imposition of Hindi is not justified.
Zomato has also put out a response following the backlash and have issued an apology for the same. "Vanakkam Vikash, we apologise for our customer care agent's behaviour. Here's our official statement on this incident. We hope you give us a chance to serve you better next time. Pls don't #Reject_Zomato," read their tweet. They also said that they have terminated the agent and taken action against her. Here is the full statement:
Imposition of Hindi has been very common in southern India, and a lot of people have been shamed for communicating in their own languages. This incident is one of many that has come to light and companies should do better to understand the diverse culture and languages that India is made up of to avoid such incidents.
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