Zomato's Deepinder Goyal seeks higher tolerance, reinstates staff after Hindi fiasco

Today is a big day for us. A new Day Zero. But we couldn’t have gotten here without the incredible efforts of India’s entire internet ecosystem. Jio’s prolific growth has set all of us up for unprecedented scale: Zomato founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal

Zomato co-founder Deepinder Goyal on October 19 reinstated an agent who was fired by the company earlier in the day for asking a Tamil customer to learn Hindi and said that Indians should increase their level of tolerance.

The food delivery company landed in a soup after its employee told a customer that Hindi is the “national language” and everyone should know it. The comment took Twitter by storm and the hashtag #RejectZomato started trending shortly after.

The screenshots of a conversation with a Zomato agent was shared by a user named Vikash who was reportedly schooled for not knowing Hindi and faced problems while trying to get in touch with the restaurant to discuss issues with the order due to a “language barrier.”

The Zomato customer in question had reportedly said that the company must hire people who understand Tamil if it is offering its services in Tamil Nadu. To this, the agent had replied saying: “For your kind information, Hindi is our national language. So it is very common that everybody should know Hindi little bit (sic)."

While Zomato issued an apology for the comment and announced that the employee has been fired, CEO Deepinder Goyal took to Twitter hours later and revealed that the employee was reinstated as "this alone is not something she should have been fired for. This is easily something she can learn and do better about going forward".

Goyal said: "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 added: "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."

This is not for the first time the Zomato CEO has taken the bullet for an issue potent enough to trigger frowns in India.

In 2019, when a customer cancelled his order, citing delivery by a "non-Hindu" boy, Goyal had said that the company didn't care if it lost any customer that came in the way of their values.

"We are proud of the idea of India - and the diversity of our esteemed customers and partners. We aren’t sorry to lose any business that comes in the way of our values," he had Tweeted.