Eternal-owned food delivery platform Zomato has shut its customer support centre in Hyderabad and laid off around 240 employees, people aware of the matter said. Employees were informed of the decision on Monday.
The closure follows a shift of most of the company’s customer support work to specialised external vendors over the past six months, sources said. “Our customer support model has changed significantly over the past six months, with more work now managed through specialised external partners,” one of the persons said.
“We had to make the difficult decision to discontinue our Customer Delight operations in Hyderabad and organise our in-house operations from a single location in Gurugram. This decision affects approximately 240 colleagues,” a person aware of the development said, referring to the internal name for the support function. The exits are not a reflection of performance or contribution, the person added.
The in-house work that remains will be run out of Gurugram, and needs to operate as one integrated team, closer to the company’s product, technology, analytics and business functions, sources cited above added.
Affected employees will receive four months’ pay in addition to their August salary, including contractual notice pay and a one-time ex gratia payment, they added. Medical insurance and counselling support will continue until March 31, 2027, ownership of company-issued laptops and earphones is being transferred to them, and outplacement assistance is being offered.
Outsourcing customer support to specialised vendors converts a fixed salary and real estate cost into a per-ticket variable cost that expands during festive peaks and contracts when order volumes fall. Consumer internet companies have been routing support to external providers and automation over the past two years, shrinking in-house contact centre teams.
For Zomato, Monday’s decision extends a shift that began over a year ago. In April 2025, the company let go of close to 600 customer support associates across its Gurugram and Hyderabad offices, most of them hired barely a year earlier under the Zomato Associate Accelerator Programme (ZAAP), under which around 1,500 people were taken on in support roles with the promise of moving into sales, operations, programme management, supply chain and category teams.
Those exits came weeks after the company launched Nugget, an in-house artificial intelligence-powered customer support platform built over three years, which it said at the time was handling around 15 million interactions a month and resolving up to 80% of customer queries without human intervention.
Eternal did not immediately respond to a request for comment at the time of going to press.