NEW DELHI: After facing outrage over seeming to capitulate to a bigoted customer on Monday,
Airtel today sought to do damage control again by saying what happened was "just one colleague responding on behalf of another" who had logged out.
On the day this happened, Airtel took as long as nine hours to tell the offensive customer that that they "don't differentiate between customers, employees and partners." Outraged customers on Twitter, including former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah said they were going to cancel their Airtel connections.
Following its lukewarm response as long as nine hours after the offensive customer tweet came to light, Airtel today again sought to absolve itself.
The cellular service provider said its customer service representative were just following best practices to resolve a customer complaint. It also painted the whole episode as distressing and a "harsh lesson" for the two service representatives involved, that "their
religious identity matters".
Airtel said in a statement today that
Shoaib, the customer service representative whom a customer didn't want to deal with because he's Muslim, had logged off, and his colleague,
Gaganjot, merely responded to be able to "minimize the time taken to resolve any customer query". Gaganjot, said Airtel, "didn't check his colleague's religious identity before taking up the case".
"For us, Monday was simply a case of two dedicated professionals, Shoaib and Gaganjot, following a dutiful course in their regular work shift...So when a customer writes in and one advisor is busy, it gets assigned to next available advisor automatically. Which is exactly what happened with Shoaib and Gaganjot," said Airtel in a statement it tweeted today.
Airtel insisted it didn't capitulate to discrimination.
"We are still trying to wrap our head around how one colleague responding on behalf of another is being misconstrued as our 'acceptance of discrimination'. We did not and we repeat, DID NOT change the advisor because of the unfathomable request from said customer. At Airtel, we never have and never will succumb to differentiating on the basis of religion, ethnicity of caste," it said further.
a customer tweeted saying she didn't want a Muslim customer service representative helping her because she doubted his "work ethic".
Below is the offensive customer tweet and Airtel's response from Monday.
Below is Airtel's earlier tweet saying it doesn't differentiate based on religion.
