Just Eat is planning to open a call centre in Sunderland, which will employ 1,500 people as it shifts 1,500 roles from India and Bulgaria to the UK.
The business plans to invest £100m in the North-east of England over a five-year period, with staff working both remotely and from its new Sunderland-based office in a hybrid working model.
Just Eat UK managing director, Andrew Kenny, said much of Just Eat’s customer service had been run from Bulgaria and India, but bosses have already seen an increase in customer satisfaction among those who dealt with the 300 people already hired in Sunderland.
He said: “Our experience of operating this model across numerous other geographies around the world shows that the overall service that we provide to both our customers and restaurants increases very meaningfully.
“We’re already seeing a very material increase in customer satisfaction scores from the agents that we already have in Sunderland.”
Bringing the jobs into the company will also allow Just Eat to respond more quickly to feedback and patterns, he added.
The agents employed by Just Eat will work under a hybrid model, partly from home and partly in the office in Houghton-le-Spring.
Kenny added: “We absolutely believe in the role that the office environment plays in our culture and in driving innovation as we move forward.
“But equally, we don’t want to move fully away from some of the more positive aspects that working from home has brought to people’s personal lives and family lives.”