Zomato lays off 541 employees, says technology made several roles ‘redundant’

Team Udayavani, Sep 8, 2019, 9:29 AM IST

New Delhi: Online restaurant guide and food ordering platform Zomato on Saturday laid off 541 employees across its customer, merchant and delivery partner support teams, within a month of firing around 60 workers.

Zomato has extended between two to four months’ severance pay based on the employee’s tenure, a company spokesperson told PTI.

“Today, we let go of 541 people, around 10 per cent of Zomato’s strength, across these support teams,” he said.

“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,” according to a statement issued by Zomato.

Zomato has dramatically improved the speed of service resolution such that now only 7.5 per cent of its orders need support, down from 15 per cent in March, the statement said.

“There is no one intervention or optimisation that has led us here, but a series of technological and process advances that on one-end spurred the growth of our food delivery business and subsequently the 5X growth of our delivery partner fleet over the last year have also led to fewer support queries and certain redundancies within our support functions,” it added.