Zomato Closes Hyderabad Support After Nugget Takes the Work

Zomato told approximately 240 Hyderabad Customer Delight staff on Monday that their support floor is closing. Eternal is folding leftover in-house tickets into Gurugram, after six months of sending more of the queue to specialised outside partners.

The bot the company built for this work, Nugget, already handles more than 15 million conversations a month across Zomato, Blinkit and Hyperpure.

Hyderabad’s Last Customer Delight Floor Is Closing

Staff were informed on Monday morning, 31 August. Customer Delight is Zomato’s internal name for the support function that takes order complaints, refunds and escalations. A person aware of the development said the review was of the operating model, not of how those colleagues had performed, and that the decision hits approximately 240 people.

Eternal, the listed parent of Zomato and Blinkit, has not put out a public note. It did not reply to emailed queries. One account of the closure said some of the affected roles sit with third-party firms rather than on Eternal’s own payroll, which has not been confirmed by the company.

WHAT IS CONFIRMED, AND WHAT IS NOT

• The briefing: Hyderabad Customer Delight staff were told on Monday that the centre is being discontinued.
• The remaining desk: In-house support that stays inside the group is being run as one team in Gurugram, next to product, technology, analytics and business.
• The vendor shift: People familiar with the work say more tickets have moved to specialised outside partners over the past six months.
• The public record: Eternal has not issued a statement, named the vendors, or said how many people were offered a Gurugram seat.

A person close to the development said a few staff were offered a move to the Gurugram customer team, which is already large. For everyone else, the Hyderabad floor is the exit.

Nugget Already Runs 15 Million Chats a Month

Deepinder Goyal, founder and chief executive of Eternal, introduced Nugget on 17 February 2025 as the first product from Zomato Labs. He said it had been built in-house over three years and was already powering more than 15 million support interactions a month for Zomato, Blinkit and Hyperpure, resolving up to 80 percent of queries on its own.

Built over 3 years as an internal tool, Nugget now powers 15M+ support interactions/month for Zomato, Blinkit & Hyperpure.

Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Eternal, on X

🚀 Introducing Nugget—an AI-native, no-code customer support platform.

Nugget helps businesses scale support effortlessly—highly customizable, low-cost, no dev team needed. No rigid workflows, just seamless automation.

✅ Resolves up to 80% of queries autonomously
✅ Learns &… pic.twitter.com/pnVrUEhmcd

— Deepinder Goyal (@deepigoyal) February 17, 2025

He also said 90 percent of companies that had seen the tool had signed up, and he offered it free to founders still stuck in contracts with older support vendors. By early 2026 the same stack was being sold into financial services, hospitality and healthcare.

A MongoDB case study dated 24 March, quoting Vivek Gupta, senior developer on Nugget at Zomato, put newer operating figures on that claim. As of January, Nugget handled more than 15 million conversations a month, resolved 85 percent of queries, and lifted human agent output by 40 percent. Support costs that had run at $20 million a year, spread across 10 platforms that auto-cleared about 60 percent of tickets, had been cut annual support spend to $9 million, a 55 percent drop, or $11 million.

NUGGET AGAINST THE OLD SUPPORT STACK

Gupta said Nugget was built for support work in which conversations are split across channels and automation still has to sit beside human judgment. The Hyderabad floor was the human side of that split. Eighteen months after Goyal’s launch post, that floor is being wound up.

The Same Support Cut Came 16 Months Earlier

Monday’s briefing is the second time in a year and a half that Customer Delight headcount has been taken down after Nugget’s numbers were put on the table. In 2024 the company hired about 1,500 people under the Zomato Associate Accelerator Programme, mostly into support, with a pitch that they could move into sales, operations, programme management, supply chain or category roles within a year.

HOW IN-HOUSE SUPPORT WAS WOUND DOWN

1. 2024: ZAAP takes on about 1,500 people, largely in support, across Gurugram and Hyderabad.
2. 17 February 2025: Goyal launches Nugget and says it already runs more than 15 million interactions a month and can close up to 80 percent of queries alone.
3. April 2025: People familiar with the process say close to 600 customer support associates are let go, most of them ZAAP hires whose contracts are not renewed, weeks after the Nugget launch.
4. Past six months: More of the remaining queue moves to specialised outside partners.
5. 31 August 2026: Hyderabad Customer Delight is discontinued; approximately 240 people are told the floor is closing.

Goyal later rejected the 600 figure. On a podcast he said those reports were wrong and put the exits at around 20 people after months of performance feedback. The two accounts still sit side by side; Eternal has not published a reconciliation. What is not in dispute is the direction. In-house support has been getting smaller while query volume across Zomato, Blinkit and Hyperpure has kept growing.

Four Months’ Pay and the Laptop Stay With Them

The 2026 packet is fuller than the thin terms described after the ZAAP round. Eternal is paying August salary plus four months of pay, mixing contractual notice and a one-time extra payment, and it is handing over the hardware people already use.

THE HYDERABAD EXIT PACKET

Counselling and medical cover run seven months past the Monday briefing. Keeping the laptop and earphones is the practical line in that list: people walk out able to apply for work on the same kit they used on the floor. Dedicated outplacement is being offered to match those skills to other openings. A hiring manager in Hyderabad was already asking, the next day, for names of people who had been hit, saying the team had local roles that might fit. The 240 are being treated as a ready list, not as a distant headline.

Eternal Added Thousands While This Floor Emptied

This is not a company shrinking overall. For the quarter ended 30 June, food delivery net order value rose 20 percent to June-quarter food orders of ₹10,769 crore. Group revenue was ₹20,211 crore, up 182 percent from ₹7,167 crore a year earlier. Profit after tax was ₹92 crore, from ₹25 crore. Food delivery revenue rose 37 percent to ₹3,100 crore. Blinkit’s net order value rose 86.2 percent to ₹17,132 crore.

ETERNAL IN THE JUNE QUARTER

• Food delivery NOV: ₹10,769 crore, up 20 percent, the fifth straight quarter of faster growth.
• Group revenue: ₹20,211 crore, up 182 percent from ₹7,167 crore.
• Profit after tax: ₹92 crore, from ₹25 crore a year earlier.
• Blinkit NOV: ₹17,132 crore, up 86.2 percent.

At 31 March, Eternal had 21,995 people on the books, 5,620 more than a year earlier, a 34.32 percent rise. Approximately 240 Hyderabad support roles are about 1 percent of that headcount and the entire satellite floor. Employee-benefit costs in the June quarter were still rising. The company is hiring into the businesses that are scaling and taking people out of the function Nugget was built to shrink.

Why Remaining Support Work Goes to Gurugram

The leftover in-house tickets are being pulled to Gurugram so support sits beside the teams that ship product, write the models, and read the complaint data. That is the stated logic, and it only works if most of the volume no longer needs a Hyderabad roster. Outside partners take the specialised remainder and turn a fixed salary and a floor lease into a per-ticket cost that can swell when festive orders spike and shrink when they do not.

WHERE THE TICKETS GO NOW

• Nugget: Closes the bulk of chats and calls across Zomato, Blinkit and Hyperpure, more than 15 million conversations a month as of January.
• Outside partners: Handle specialised work that still needs a person, on a variable ticket cost rather than a Hyderabad payroll.
• Gurugram in-house team: Keeps the thin layer that still has to sit next to product, technology, analytics and business.

The quality worry on that split is simple. Once the Hyderabad humans are gone, a messy refund or a late-night complaint is more likely to hit a bot that still misses tone, or a vendor agent who does not sit next to the people who can change the app. Nugget has not been walked back the way some overseas support bots were after customers pushed. Festive volume will test that bet in public, on the same tickets Customer Delight used to take in Hyderabad.

As of Wednesday, Eternal had still said nothing in its own name. Medical cover and counselling for the people told on Monday run until 31 March 2027. The laptops go with them.