Ibibo Group / Goibibo — Conspiracy, harassment and unlawful deductions from salary

Address:	Gurgaon, Haryana, 122009
Website:	www.goibibo.com

I am a female employee of Intellect Services Pvt. Ltd. - a unit of goibibo.com. I have over 7 years of experience across various industries like aviation, hospitality & customer relations and I joined this organization 7 months ago to serve as a Sr. Associate - Operations.

Over the last 6 months of my working, I have worked very hard towards my responsibilities and received several appreciations from customers on call as well as emails. Basis my proven track record, the company's top management was apparently planning to offer me a bigger role, additional responsibility and increment in remuneration.

However, the approach of a handful middle management male employees caused a big dent in my reputation and productivity over the last 1 month. To subside their competition and my increasing performance in the team, they set up a conspiracy to tarnish my image as well create situations to force me for leaving my job.

It all started on a Saturday night shift when, with all the other female staff members, I had left office after my regular day shift and the male staff took charge for the night shift (FYI - This is a good company policy for which I respect management's wisdom)

Late in the said night, a customer frustrated by his own mistake (booking an International flight from overseas country to his home country on the last day of his visa validity) called up our customer care wing to ask for -
1. Flight options (since his booked flight got cancelled on the day his visa was expiring)
2. A free night stay (since the next available flight was for the following day but the customer had reached the airport)
3. A business class travel (since he wanted premium lounge of the airline to wait with his wife)

To give a background, the customer was already aware that his flight schedule had changed and given his acceptance for the next day's flight. However, when the airport authorities denied him the travel because of his fault of visa getting expired the same day he planned to run away from the country, he started calling people in Goibibo.

Though such cases and complaints are quite a norm in our industry, this situation became unnatural when he put the customer care supervisor on hold to call someone else secretly and then come back and demand extra favours from Goibibo.

After several calls, he came up with a new idea and started putting false accusations on the conversation he had with me a day prior to the date he came to the airport claiming that I had told him only the change in hours and minutes of flight change but not the change in day. He tried to outsmart and put blame on goibibo for giving him half information even after receiving obvious SMS alerts from the airline informing day, date & time of the revised flight schedule. He also received an email from goibibo 24 hours prior to his original flight time that there is a schedule change and hence are the new flight timings. But he did not accept his mistake of ignoring the emails and airline alerts only because he thought that verbal communication was misguiding. But the real truth was that his visa was expiring and the he had to fly out of the country before he gets detained at the airport.

Out of his fear, when this over-smart customer tried to harass our customer care supervisor on night shift that time, our talented supervisor and in-charge of the duties on that fateful night ceased this opportunity to crack a side deal with this customer.

Though the customer and his wife got the same flight which was rescheduled, his side deal with our supervisor and operations in-charge managed to get him a free night stay at goibibo partner hotel, access to premium lounge & business class tickets of the same flight in which he was anyway going to depart. And while the customer had himself told this supervisor that both he and his wife had already got a 24 hour extension on their visa (on medical grounds which he faked at the airport), our middle management conspirators went ahead and upgraded his tickets to business class leading the company to incur a loss of around 1 lakh.

The issue got escalated due to the huge amount of loss caused by these middle management, terribly abashed supervisors and to save their positions, they all made a plan to use customer's allegation of a verbal miscommunication against the female executive in-charge of that call during the day shift.

They mutually decided to project this loss as an 'Agent Loss' (a malpractice popularized in this organization for harassing operation associates again by a handful mid-level managers) and fine the female call receiver on day shift (unfortunately myself). Overnight, the decision to deduct 50% of this loss from my salary was taken by this bunch of conspirators and they issued an email with the ultimatum without giving me a single heads up of what all happened in those late hours behind my back.

I was not contacted or asked even once on this matter. No one even bothered to hear my call recordings to confirm whether it was my mistake or not. They took the customer's accusation to be true and resultantly deducted a convenient amount from my salary as an EMI for the total loss imposed on me.

I was puzzled and completely unaware of the entire issue so I approached my team leaders, HR, managers on duty during the night shift and finance department as well. Every person had only one judgement that, "it is an agent loss though we have not listened to your recording but because the seniors think it is your mistake, we will deduct your money."

Furious, I came home discussed the problem with my family and then started recalling the incident. Luckily, I had all the records of my conversation with this over-smart customer and that's where I found the following concerning loopholes -

1. Why did the customer wait till the last day of his visa validity to book his international flight?

2. If the flight was for Saturday night, why did he call on Friday late afternoon to confirm the timings when he had ideally received the airline alert as well an email from goibibo about flight reschedules?

3. Why did the supervisor on night shift offer him a business class travel of the same flight in which he was already flying on Sunday morning in economy class with a Visa extension? How is goibibo responsible for his visa expiry?

4. How can a supervisor make such a big decision within minutes without looking at the price difference between the two categories (business & economy) and incurring a loss of Rs. 1 lakh to the company?

5. What is the need for this supervisor to give in to such stupid demands when every goibibo communication email and COMPANY POLICIES clearly state that Goibibo is not responsible for any changes or reschedule information related to the flights or other transport bookings?

6. What sense does it make for upgrading the customer to the Business class of the same flight when he has already told this supervisor that his visa has been extended for 24 hours due to medical grounds and he can now fly easily on Sunday morning?

7. If the decision has been taken by the supervisor and middle management's so called decision makers, without looping in any associate or his/her team leader, how can they deduct the associate's salary who is the junior most in their hierarchy?

Does this mean that my only fault was to take that Friday afternoon call? Well, that's my job, I'm supposed to read the information from the system and convey it to the caller. And for that call also, I only read out what the system communicated. So, with this logic, its a system error and their entire Tech development department should be penalised.

On understanding the complete scenario and noting my 7 points of concern, I reached the Operations head who after avoiding me for 10 days joins his hands and pleads "I'm sorry but I had to blame things on you otherwise I would have lost my job for taking such a stupid decision. If you don't tell this to anybody, I will speak to the finance department and try to give some discount on your deductions."

This response has made me even more furious. I feel pity on the owners of this great establishment GoIbibo. Somebody must have built this entity with so much sweat and blood. It must have been someone's dream, someone's biggest achievement of life. But this careless bunch of wrong hires and undeserving managers are like termites, eating into the company, harassing hard working employees to cover up their mistakes and pay a price for it too. This is the learning they're instilling in the minds of fresh, young talents who wanted to grow in this system.

If such conspiracies and side deals are not stopped now, they will eat up the entire system without the top management knowing anything out of it.

Everyone please spread the word around. These managers & department heads should be a window/ a channel of effective functioning between management objectives and execution workforce. But what they're doing is the shaming the whole group & their industry reputation big time. DISGUSTING is the word.