Opinion

The folly of India's Airtel

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June 21, 2018

A reprehensible case of Islamophobia has started a serious row in India. The telecoms company Airtel is being condemned for kowtowing to a Sikh customer who refused to deal with a Muslin staff member, because she said she had “No faith in the Muslim’s work ethics” since “the Koran (Qur’an) may have a different version for customer service". She wanted her problem to be dealt with by a Hindu representative.

Far from telling this Sikh woman, Pooja Singh, that her demand was entirely unacceptable, Airtel shamelessly caved in and assigned a Hindu staff member to help her.

It also sent a holding message that read “Hey. I most definitely appreciate you reaching out here! We’ll take a closer look into that & get back shortly with more information”.

Apart from the gibberish that passes these days for ersatz enthusiasm in modern business communications, this message should never have been sent, given the repugnant nature of the woman’s complaint. Airtel then went on to compound its egregious behavior by assigning a Hindu employee to handle the issue.

What is so startling about this affair is that the exchanges were conducted on Twitter, in a public area where everyone could see. This accounts for the considerable blowback at the woman’s original complaint and Airtel’s supine response.

Customer service in India ought to be high quality because of the country’s highly successful international call center business along with innovative information and communications technology. But of course, the foreign clients of India’s thriving call center industry write their own protocols detailing how enquiries should be treated. Clearly Airtel is hugely deficient in this area. It may be claiming that the first response was a standard message. However, the parlous state of its procedures was illustrated by the fact that someone, probably a line manager, saw nothing objectionable in this woman’s Islamophobic Tweet.

Indian Muslims are rightly furious and there is a call to boycott Airtel service. Unfortunately, this may provide an excuse for Hindu bigots, who lurk in Delhi’s corridors of power, to stir up a counter-reaction. The sensible response is for Airtel itself to completely review its customer relations, discipline the staff who behaved so outrageously and carpet the senior executives who are ultimately responsible for how it treats its customers.

India seems mired in troubles at the moment, with rich businessmen fleeing abroad to avoid the consequences of collapsed, allegedly fraudulent deals, the still-prevalent scandal of gang rape and general abuse of women and the recent false claim that every single village now has access to electricity. This week the government also faced the embarrassment of having to abandon the privatization of national carrier Air India because not a single bidder came forward to buy a 76 percent in the badly-run and heavily-indebted airline. Part of the problem was the government’s insistence that it keep a stake, which one analyst said meant it would also keep a license to meddle in what should become a purely commercial operation.

On the plus side, the outrage over Airtel’s awful failure has come all the country’s religious communities, including Hindus. India’s biggest challenge is reputational and it needs to fix it. International investors still see it as an unreliable in regulatory terms. And overseas interest is not enhanced by the reality that many of the country’s own business moguls themselves still prefer to invest abroad.


June 21, 2018
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