Eternal's food-delivery platform Zomato closed its Hyderabad customer-support center on August 31, 2026, affecting roughly 250 people who worked in what the company calls its "Customer Delight" operation. The remaining in-house support team is being consolidated at Zomato's Gurugram headquarters.

The company has described the move as a change to its "operating model" rather than a performance-driven cut, and it fits a pattern that's been building for about six months: more of Zomato's customer-support volume is being routed to third-party vendors instead of handled in-house. Affected staff were offered their August salary plus four months of additional pay (including notice pay and ex-gratia amounts), continued medical insurance and counselling support through March 31, 2027, retention of company laptops and earphones, and outplacement assistance to help with the job search.

Part of a longer pattern, not an isolated event

This isn't Zomato's first restructuring of its support function. In April 2025, the company cut roughly 500 roles from its associate support program around the same time it rolled out Nugget, an in-house AI tool for handling customer queries. Read together, the two rounds point to a steady shift: as automated and outsourced support absorbs more routine queries, the in-house team shrinks and consolidates rather than scales with order volume.

What this means if you work in customer support

The pattern at Zomato mirrors what's happening across e-commerce and food-delivery platforms more broadly in India: first-line, high-volume query handling is the easiest layer to automate or outsource, while escalation handling, vendor quality oversight, and cross-functional troubleshooting are proving harder to replace. If you're in a BPO or in-house support role at a consumer platform, it's worth treating that as a signal rather than a one-off headline.

• Move toward escalation and resolution roles rather than first-contact ticket handling, which is the segment most exposed to AI tools and outsourcing.
• Pick up vendor and quality-management skills — companies still need people to manage the outsourced partners replacing in-house teams, even when headcount in the core team shrinks.
• Document measurable outcomes (resolution time, customer satisfaction scores, process improvements you drove) so your experience translates into roles beyond pure support, such as operations or process excellence.

Zomato's statement frames this as restructuring rather than a downturn, and the company continues to hire in other parts of the business. But for anyone in consumer-platform support functions, it's a reminder that the roles most likely to be restructured are the highly standardized, high-volume ones — and that building skills adjacent to, rather than inside, that layer is the more durable bet. (People Matters)