Zomato to lay off 200+ Hyderabad customer-support employees
Zomato is reportedly consolidating its customer-delight operations into a single team at Eternal’s Gurugram office, affecting about 240 Hyderabad employees. The severance package includes August salary, four months’ pay, medical cover and counselling through March 2027.
What happened
Zomato is reportedly laying off about 240 Hyderabad customer-delight employees as it consolidates customer support into one functional team at Eternal's
Key facts
- Over 200 employees
- Around 240 employees expected to be affected
- August salary plus four months' pay
- Medical insurance and counselling until March 2027
- 500 junior-level employees laid off in April 2025
- LivSpace: 1,000 employees in February
- Flipkart: around 400 employees in March
- Amazon India: 800 employees
- Paytm: 400 employees, about 1% of workforce
Why this matters
The consolidation highlights Eternal’s preference for centralized shared services, a model that could shape integration planning for future acquisitions or portfolio businesses.
What to watch
- Changes in average first-response time, resolution time, reopen rates and customer-satisfaction scores after the consolidation.
- A rise in cancellation, refund, compensation or customer-care expense as a percentage of food-delivery GOV.
- Evidence of higher delivery-partner or restaurant-partner complaints related to issue resolution.
- New customer-support hiring in Gurugram, outsourced BPO contracts, or expanded AI-support product rollouts.
- Management commentary on fixed-cost discipline, adjusted EBITDA margins and employee-cost savings in subsequent earnings.
- Reports of further layoffs or back-office centralization across Zomato, Blinkit or other Eternal operations.
- Complete knowledge transfer and migrate Hyderabad support queues, escalation protocols and quality-control processes to Gurugram.
- Prioritize retention or selective rehiring of high-performing specialists for fraud, safety, high-value customer and delivery-partner escalations.
- Increase deployment of chatbot, self-service and agent-assist tools to absorb volume without rebuilding headcount.
- Track support SLAs, repeat-contact rates, refund leakage, app-store sentiment and social-media complaint volume during the transition.
- Assess further shared-services consolidation across Eternal portfolio functions if the support migration produces measurable savings.