Food delivery company Zomato found itself in the eye of storm after one of its customer from Tamil Nadu alleged that he was denied a refund from Zomato Customer care for not knowing the “national language” Hindi.
Complaining about the behaviour of a Zomato Customer Care executive, a Twitter user @Vikash67456607 said he had ordered food on Zomato but one of the items was missing. He tried talking to Zomato customer care to find out about the missing item. As the customer was based out of Tamil Nadu, he was only conversing in Tamil thus creating a language barrier for the executive as he or she could only understand Hindi.
“Ordered food in zomato and an item was missed. Customer care says amount can’t be refunded as I didn’t know Hindi. Also takes lesson that being an Indian I should know Hindi,” wrote Vikash and attached screenshots showing the insensitive comments. Take a look at the tweet here:
The customer also urged Zomato to consider giving the agent proper training instead of terminating her. “Hello@zomato. Apart from the clarification regarding the issue, I request you to reconsider on recruiting back the employee rather than terminating. I suggest to give them a proper training instead. The legacy of Tamils is self-respect and not revenge,” he said in a tweet later.
Soon, a massive backlash erupted on Twitter with many slamming the food delivery app for “imposing Hindi” on its customers. With more than 4,500 likes and 2,500 retweets, it soon went viral and #Rejectzomato began to trend on the microblogging site with more than 20k tweets. Responding to the backlash on Twitter, Zomato said the agent had been sacked, posting with the Tamil greeting ‘Vanakkam’.
“We are sorry for the behaviour of our customer care agent, we have terminated the agent for their negligence towards our diverse culture. The termination is in line with our protocols, and agent’s behaviour was clearly against the principles of sensitivity that we train our agents for on a regular basis (sic),” said the company in a statement in both English and Tamil.
However, a few hours later, company founder Deepinder Goyal called it an “ignorant mistake” and announced that the agent was reinstated.
“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?” he said, adding that it is something the person can learn going forward.
