Airtel has released a statement explaining its stance -- in a bigger note than the one it issued on the day of the controversy -- after an Airtel customer asked the company to not assign a Muslim service executive to look into her problem. Titled "Did Airtel bow down to a discriminatory request? May be you should read this", the press statement claims that a regular dutiful day at Airtel was misinterpreted to end up making national headlines.
Airtel explained that it did not assign any specific executive to look into the problem of the customer in question but that the executives were changed automatically due to how its systems responded to complaints made on social media platforms like Twitter.
"As it is true for many customer care processes, the idea is to minimize the time taken to resolve any customer care processes. So when a customer writes in and one advisor is busy, the query gets assigned to the next available advisor automatically. Which is what exactly happened with Shoaib and Gaganjot," says Airtel.
The controversy started on Monday on Twitter when an Airtel user named Pooja Singh reported some issue through a tweet, which was then responded to by Airtel's social media team member named Shoaib. Pooja replied to the tweet saying she wanted someone else to look into the issue. "Dear Shoaib, as you're a Muslim and I have no faith in your working ethics because Kuran may have different version for customer service, thus requesting you to assign a Hindu representative for my request Thanks," she replied.
Her tweet was then responded to by an Airtel service executive named Gaganjot. In his tweet, Gaganjot had nothing to say about the bigoted request that Pooja had made. Instead he simply focussed on trying to resolve her problem.
But this led to outrage from many Indian Twitter users, who alleged that Airtel had agreed to the bigoted request made by the company's customer. With more and more people slamming Airtel, the company issued a statement saying that it didn't discriminate customers or its own employees on the basis of religion, caste or race.
Airtel says that its executives chose to help the customer regardless of the outrageous request made by her, which shows the dutifulness and dedication of its employees.
The company says that Shoaib was not logged in and the case was automatically taken up by its next available executive Gaganjot. Airtel says that the fact that Gaganjot did not check on his colleague's religious identity was misunderstood by the world as "heeding to a discriminatory request". The company says that it did not bow down to any religious bigotry and that it would continue to resist such religious considerations at the work place.