'Not something she should be fired for': Deepinder Goyal reinstates agent amid #RejectZomato call

With hashtags like #RejectZomato and #HindiImposition taking centre stage, Zomato founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal has said that an ignorant error committed by a support centre person working with the food delivery platform became a national issue and that the "level of tolerance and chill in our country needs to be way higher than it is nowadays."

He added that Zomato is reinstating the support centre agent in question as this is something that she can work upon going forward. Goyal also stated, “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.”

The fracas began when a Zomato user named Vikash reported that an item was missing from his order. As per Vikash, the customer care agent told him that the amount could not be refunded as he did not know Hindi.

Vikash then said that if Zomato is available in Tamil Nadu then they should hire people who know the language and asked the agent to transfer his matter to someone else and get the refund.  “For your kind information, Hindi is our national language. So, it is very common that everybody should know Hindi a little bit,” the agent said.

After this tweet became viral on Twitter, the online food delivery platform issued an apology for the conduct of their support centre agent’s behaviour. “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 behavior was clearly against the principles of sensitivity that we train our agents for on a regular basis,” the statement read.

The company also mentioned that they are building a Tamil version of their app. “We have already localised marketing communication in Tamil for the state (example: we also signed up Aniruddh Ravichander as our local brand ambassador), and we are in the process of building a local Tamil call/support centre in Coimbatore. We understand food and language are core to any local culture and we take both of them very seriously.”

Edited by Mehak Agarwal

Also read: Zomato fires customer care agent, apologises for ‘Hindi imposition’

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