On Tuesday, soon after Zomato, restaurant aggregator and food delivery apologized to a person, who alleged that he was denied a refund by its customer care agent for not knowing Hindi and announced terminating the services of the employee concerned.
The complaint on Twitter was trending for some time. A tweet from a user who goes by the handle ''@Vikash67456607'' triggered a major Twitter backlash, with the hashtag ''Reject_Zomato'' trending on top at the microblogging site.
Soon after, Deepinder Goyal, founder, Zomato sought to defend the agent.
Goyal said, most people at the call center were young people ''at the start of their learning curves.''
In a series of tweets, he said ''an ignorant mistake by someone in a support center 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 all tolerate each other's imperfections and appreciate 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 center 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 added.
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.
''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,'' (I don't know Hindi), she tweeted.
And that led to another hashtag #Hindi_Theriyathu_Poda, trending on Twitter!
In response to Goyal's tweet asking for 'tolerance': "...we should all tolerate each other's imperfections", some like Keerthivasan demanded to know why should they 'tolerate'.
This tweet that brought to the fore the famous Shakepearean quote: What's in name?; evidently stating a lot by just that moniker:
