Agarwal Stumbled over Exchanges on X Aggarwal's defensive and confrontational reaction not only escalated the controversy but also redirected the focus from the concerns of customers to the behaviour of the CEO.
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In the past week, Ola shares saw a dip after a social media spat between its CEO Bhavish Agarwal and comedian Kunal Kamra due to a post on X by latter over the piling up of complaints of company's electric scooters.
Kamra who voiced against the delay in service and tagged union minister Nitin Gadkari and other government bodies to look into the matter, was asked to work at Ola service centre by Agarwal in the reply.
Following the spat which initiated a various conversation among industry, netizens, and influencers ranging from PR and marketing strategy to rude and arrogant behaviour of OLA CEO, the company's shares were plunged down 9 per cent.
This incident which could have been avoided by just not doing an impulsive reply to the comedian and with a better management by the team of the company was further dragged and the central government slapped a notice to the company and launched an investigation into the matter.
While entrepreneur came forward in defence of Agarwal, a social meida influencer Aditya Shah shared some screen shots where Ola had reached out to him for a paid promotion of the company and said, "While the Ola Electric CEO rants on someone else's paid tweet or not, I & multiple influencers were approached to do a paid tweet about Ola just as recently as last month."
Remarks by Ola CEO drew widespread criticism and raised questions about how leaders should engage with their critics on social media platform.
In the past, Zomato had also received criticism when it tried to introduce "Veg-Fleet" by assigning green uniforms to the delivery executives who were engaged in delivering veg orders. However, he quickly withdrew the idea as the founder Deepinder Goyal understood the mood of the people over the matter.
October 6th weekend ended differently for both the founder and CEO as on the one hand Agarwal got involved in the social media spat with the comedian inviting a lot of criticism while on the other hand, Goyal posed as delivery executive and went to a mall to deliver food to understand the ground reality and the challenges that delivery partners face.
Both the incidents offer an important lesson in how the leaders should manage their public relations during the criticism. Aggarwal's defensive and confrontational reaction not only escalated the controversy but also redirected the focus from the concerns of customers to the behaviour of the CEO.
