 "Food delivery platform Zomato lays off nearly 600 customer support staff")
Food delivery platform Zomato has fired nearly 600 customer support executives within a year of hiring.
These people were hired under its Zomato Associate Accelerator Program (ZAAP), which was launched last year.
The layoffs are also happening due to higher usage of artificial intelligence (AI) in customer services.
The terminations have impacted employees from the Gurugram and Hyderabad offices of the company.
A former employee Business Standard spoke to, said, “The firing was unexpected. The treatment that we (other employees who also have been fired) underwent was unfair. I still do not clearly know why I was fired but it's tough to process.”
Zomato has not yet issued any comment on the development.
Zomato had reportedly hired about 1,500 people under its ZAAP programme. Initially, these employees, who were hired for customer support roles, were given hopes of transitioning to better roles. However, towards the end of their tenure, the company did not renew several of these contracts.
The layoffs happened within a month after the company launched Nugget, an artificial intelligence-powered customer support platform, to optimise its operations.
The platform currently handles over 15 million customer interactions a month for Zomato, Blinkit, and Hyperpure.
While launching the platform, Zomato's co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Deepinder Goyal wrote, “Introducing Nugget – an AI-native, no-code customer support platform.
Nugget helps scale support effortlessly and is highly customisable, low-cost and no developer team is needed. No rigid workflows, just seamless automation.”
According to data on its website, Nugget's AI agents resolve up to 80 per cent of customer queries. They assist in enhancing compliance by 20 per cent, and help in 20 per cent reduction in resolution time.