Foodtech unicorn Zomato clarifies on the layoff of 60 employees in Gurugram
In a statement, Zomato said that most of these layoffs are in the customer support department, considering the improvement in service quality and reduction in cases requiring manual support.
Foodtech unicorn Zomato has laid off around 60 employees mainly from its customer support department in Gurugram on account of 'redundancies', it said.
In a statement released to the media, Zomato said,
“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 one percent (60 people) of our workforce. Most of these redundancies are in the customer support department and also include movements to other departments as part of our Internal Job Placement (IJP) exercise.”
Zomato’s IJP programme is a lateral movement initiative that lets employees move from one department to another to gain and renew new skills.
“As we’ve expanded to more than 500 cities across India, we also expanded our workforce by over 2,000 and this requires constant realignment to new departments and results in some redundancies with the scaling of technology,” Zomato further stated.
In 2015, Zomato announced that its food delivery service is now available in 500 cities across India, adding close to 200 cities in the months of June and July.
Further the company in a blogpost also said that the top 15 cities including (including Tier-II) contributed 100 percent of Zomato’s delivery business, 12 months ago.
While it claims that the growth in those cities has doubled in 12 months, Tier III and IV cities now contribute to 40 percent of Zomato business, it said in July.
However, this isn’t the first time Zomato has let go of employees.
In a bid to cut costs in 2015, Zomato announced layoffs of 300 employees, which comprised 10 percent of its workforce, largely including its employees in the US.
Last month, Zomato also confirmed that it is shutting down its loyalty programme, PiggyBank, which allows frequent users to save on every order. This was done by the foodtech company to bring on an upgraded version of its loyalty programmes.
(Edited by Evelyn Ratnakumar)
