BENGALURU|NEW DELHI: Snapdeal has asked 200 people in its consumer service department to shape up or ship out. Most say they are opting for the second as the demands of the company’s performance improvement plan are almost impossible to meet, according to several persons aware of the development.The human resource department summoned 100 employees to give them the news on Tuesday, one of them said.“The process is still on and nearly 70 have been called in till now (Wednesday),” the person said. Over the past year, the company has been getting people to quit on the grounds of underperformance, according to three who have been asked to go.A similar process in December had seen about 150 employees being asked to leave the leading Indian ecommerce company in which Alibaba, Foxconn and Softbank are investors, along with Temasek and BlackRock.“Last trimester, which ended in November, employees were asked to leave in December. This time, before the end of this trimester, which is March, they are asking us to leave,” said one person. “In April 2015, we had close to 1,000 employees. Now we have around 500, of which 200 employees are being asked to leave.”Employees are being asked to choose between resigning or going on the performance plan, giving the person a month’s time to meet targets. Failure to do so will result in termination.“We are being asked to achieve an 85% customer satisfaction score, which is impossible because the company’s score has never crossed 62-64%,” said one of the people on the way out. “Hence, most of us are leaving because we don’t want this to show in our resume.”The company denied that it was sacking people en masse.“There have been no firings or layoffs at Snapdeal,” a spokesperson said in response to a query. “Some employees at our Contact Centre, who were not meeting the required performance parameters have been offered a Performance Improvement Plan, which offers such employees 30 days to improve their performance. Some of the employees have chosen not to go through the Performance Improvement Plan and have instead opted to exit. In deference to their wishes, Snapdeal has accepted their resignations. The PIP process is expected to cover about 200 team members.”According to the people cited above, the move comes as the company has decided to outsource most of its customer service requirements to companies such as Concentrix in Bangalore, Competent Synergies in Mohali and Firstsource Solutions in Mumbai in order to save on costs.The Delhi-based company’s customer service operations is based in its Sarita Vihar office and has about 500 employees.In an interview with ET in May last year, human resources vice president Saurabh Nigam had said that the steep rise in business volumes necessitated aggressive hiring of call centre and customer support staff.“Over the past six to seven months, our customer support team has doubled to 1,500 from around 750. We are planning to hire another 500 people in the next three to four months,” he had said at the time.People aware of the matter said the management had been contemplating the performance plan move for the last three months and eventually decided to execute it before the end of the current fiscal year.“This kind of layoff typically happens when they realize that they have over-hired,” said an HR professional. “Companies should help them in finding jobs and support them because once your business starts to pick up again, then it will be difficult to bring them back.”