Zomato lays off 540 employees, says technology advancement is the reason

New Delhi : Online food delivery and restaurant discovery platform Zomato has laid off nothing less than 540 employees from the customer support team which is looking to reduce redundancies in back-end support roles.

"Today, we let go of 541 people (or 10% of Zomato’s strength) across these support teams — based out of our offices in Gurgaon," the company said in a response to queries from Mint on Saturday.

The company paid 2-3 months of severance pay to employees laid off over the weekend.

They claimed that with improving technologies, there have been a significant drop in support related queries, this has led to several roles becoming redundant, prompting the company to layoff employees.

"Over the last few months, we have seen our technology products and platforms evolve and improve significantly. While the business has continued to grow consistently, this has led to an overall reduction in direct order-related support queries. We have dramatically improved the speed of service resolution, now only 7.5% of our orders need support (down from 15% in March)." 

In 2019, layoffs at Zomato affected 600 people across customer, merchant and delivery partner support teams, the company spokesperson said.

“This year we have hired over 1,200 people in our non-delivery teams and another 400 off-rolls positions. We have also created jobs for hundreds of thousands of delivery partners. We are still hiring in our technology, product and data sciences teams,” the company added.