Online restaurant discovery platform Zomato has laid off 541 persons employed at the company’s head office in Gurugram, Mint reported on Saturday. The company has retrenched employees across its customer support, merchant and delivery partner teams.

“Today, we let go of 541 people (or 10% of Zomato’s strength) across these support teams – based out of our offices in Gurgaon,” Zomato said in a statement in response to a query by Mint. Zomato has extended severance pay of two to four months to the employees it has laid off.

The company said that several support roles have become redundant as it has improved its technology interface over the last few months. “Over the last few months, we have seen our technology products and platforms evolve and improve significantly,” Zomato said. “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).”

The company said layoffs have affected around 600 people in the organisation in 2019. In 2015, Zomato had retrenched nearly 300 employees.

However, the firm claimed it has also hired a few thousand people this year. “This year we have hired over 1,200 people in our non-delivery teams and another 400 off-rolls positions,” the company said. “We have also created jobs for hundreds of thousands of delivery partners. We are still hiring in our technology, product and data sciences teams.”

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