Social media platforms have been agog with a battle between a stand-up comedian and the founder of India’s leading electric two-wheeler maker. It all started with a picture of rows of e-scooters gathering dust outside an Ola Electric showroom, with the stand-up comic urging Ola’s founder and CEO Bhavesh Aggarwal to attend to consumer complaints. Scores of disgruntled consumers joined the melee, complaining about the company’s service failures. Some posted videos of a showroom set on fire by a frustrated Ola EV owner. Unfortunately, instead of heeding the criticism, Aggarwal chose to mock what he called “paid-for” tweets. This hit the raw nerve afresh—by the end of Monday, Ola Electric shares had dropped 8 percent from the previous close.
The government took action, too. The Union consumer affairs secretary said on Tuesday that the Central Consumer Protection Authority had sent a notice to Ola after the government had received more than 10,000 complaints between September 2023 and August 2024 over delayed and unsatisfactory services, and inaccurate invoices. There are lessons for all consumer-facing companies in this saga. First, Aggarwal should not have personally joined the issue. Two, even if he had to, he should have tackled the complaints with grace and humility. At 39, Aggarwal is one of the world’s youngest dollar billionaires. As a self-made ‘digi-preneur’, he pioneered the app-based taxi-hailing company Ola Cabs and followed up with Ola Electric’s Rs 6,146-crore initial public offering in August, one of the largest in recent history. Aggarwal’s wealth doubled to $2.6 billion overnight.
The entrepreneur can claim good pedigree in innovation and business acumen. But it’s unfortunate that he is not at the listening post. For one, it has been a long-standing complaint that the flagship Ola S1 Pro uses a front fork arm from a Dutch model that often crumbles on India’s bumpy roads. The e-scooters have also been plagued by software glitches and battery failures. On the business front, Ola’s losses have mounted from Rs 199 crore 2020-21 to Rs 1,578 crore in 2023-24. For a mass utility product relied upon by tens of thousands of consumers—the company has a 27 per cent share of the e-scooter market—the chief executive cannot be complacent. Consumers complain in a variety of ways—one can ignore these only at one’s own peril.