CHENNAI: Zomato has faced a Twitter backlash after one of its customer care executives referred Hindi as the 'national language' of the country. Vikas from Tamil Nadu ordered food from a local restaurant using the Zomato app on Monday. As one of the food items went missing, he sought help from the customer care. The customer care executive replied that he was unable to help Vikas with the refund because of the language barrier. When Vikas insisted for further help, the executive said, "For your kind information, Hindi is our national language. So it is very common that everybody should know Hindi a bit".
Irked over this misinformation, Vikas posted the screenshot of the conversation on Twitter. Hours later, the food aggregator started facing a huge backlash as #Reject_Zomata started to trend in Chennai and other parts of the state. Soon, the company on Tuesday morning came out with a formal statement announcing the termination of the woman employee for “negligence towards our diverse culture."
DMK MP Kanimozhi tweeted: “The customer care of some companies operate only in select languages. It should be made mandatory for companies to serve their customers in their local language. A customer doesn’t necessarily need to know Hindi or English. “#Hindi_Theriyathu_Poda (3/3)
Later, Zomato reinstated the employee. On Tuesday afternoon, founder of the company Deepinder Goyal tweeted saying that this alone is not something she should have been fired for. This is easily something she can learn and do better about going forward.
"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", he further said in his Twitter thread.
"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?"
