"Over the last few months, we have seen our technology products and platforms evolve and improve significantly. While the business has continued to grow consistently, this has led to an overall reduction in direct order-related support queries," Zomato said.

The company claimed it has improved the speed of service resolution and now only 7.5 per cent of its orders need support, down from 15 per cent in March.

Zomato said that these factors have led to certain redundancies across their customer, merchant and delivery partner support teams. "Today, we let go of 541 people across these support teams," it added.

"While this has been a painful decision, to make the transition smoother, we have extended between two-four months severance pay (based on tenure), family health insurance cover (till the end of January 2020) and career fair opportunities with companies that specialise in the concerned functions," said Zomato.

The company said it hired over 1,200 people across functions (excluding its last-mile delivery fleet) and another over 400 off-rolls positions.

"We are currently hiring in our technology, product and data sciences teams," it added.

The company is also planning to introduce its fine-dining Gold programme across multiple cities on its delivery platform.

According to news agency Indo-Asian News Service (IANS), Zomato is at the loggerheads with the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) over deep discounts in its Gold programme

Last month, NRAI said that there is an in-principle agreement between the association and the two major online delivery platforms, Zomato and Swiggy, to resolve the issues of the industry including deep discounts, the report added.