Eighty-thousand complaints a month is bad for a business of any size. But if your product is hardware, it’s probably the worst nightmare you could dream of. 

For Ola Electric, this is reality. 

Pressure has been mounting on all fronts, whether that’s irate customers showing up at its service centres or the onslaught of grievances flooding social media.

It also hasn’t helped that its mercurial founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal got into a social-media spat with a standup comic who is quick with his comebacks. All that’s done is put a brighter spotlight on the enormous number of customer complaints Ola Electric is having to deal with. 

For a public company, which Ola Electric has been for the past four months, it’s hard to understate the importance of public perception—especially if you’re a commodity or service people directly interact with on a daily basis. The best practice generally is: acknowledge you are having trouble, promise you will fix it, show that you are fixing it, and then hope that things turn around before too many quarters go by. 

Well, not many of those things have happened. 

There’s been a lot of noise about how “Ola Electric’s stock will fall”. But volatility is part and parcel of the stock markets, and all the markets really tell you is which direction the tides are flowing. 

Which is why my co-host Rohin Dharmakumar and I thought this would be a great time to scratch beneath the surface and look at the big picture in our latest Two by Two podcast. Just what is happening at Ola Electric? What are the options before it? And how is India’s broader electric two-wheeler space shaping up? 

For our guests, we got two people who could really help us make sense of what’s going on: Jinesh Gandhi, Research Director at Ambit, who has more than 20 years of experience tracking multiple sectors, and Narayan Sundararaman, an accomplished leader with over 28 years of experience in marketing strategy. Narayan has worked at Cadbury, Star TV, and is the ex-CMO of Bajaj Auto.

Just one snag. Both of them were based in different cities. But we made it happen. And what we got out of it was a great discussion that’s worth a listen.