As part of cost-cutting initiative, popular food aggregator and delivery app Zomato has laid off around 70-100 employees from its customer support team in the Gurgaon office. The company cited redundancies in the department as the reason for the lay-offs.
"Over the last few months, our service quality has improved, and the percentage of orders requiring support has come down significantly creating redundancies for about 1 per cent (60 people) of our workforce," a statement released by the company read.
The statement added that the redundancies were predominantly in the customer support and "also include movements to other departments as part of our internal job placement (IJP) exercise."
It is yet to be ascertained if the employees who were given severance in advance.
"What's happening at (Zomato's) back end is that they are automating a lot of their customer service functions. Customer support is currently a major cost for both Zomato and Swiggy, and due to high volumes of orders spending Rs 4 to Rs 5 per order is a significantly high cost (in comparison to other costs)...So this (layoffs) is sort of intelligently scrapping away unnecessary spending on human resource," a source told Live Mint.
The lay-offs took place a few months after Zomato's rival FoodPanda was forced to shut down its delivery services in May. The company also had to let go of 40-50 mid-level employees and terminate the contracts for over 1,500 employees.
Over the last few years, food aggregator apps such as Swiggy and Zomato have grown exponentially and created thousands of jobs across the country, including those as delivery executives.
Zomato has reportedly hired 230,000 delivery partners. According to reports, the company currently gets 40 million orders a month and is said to have partnered with 130,000 restaurants in 500 cities across the country.
