Burger King

About the company

I'm Maksim Marshukov, head of IT projects at Burger King. We're one of the biggest fast food players in the country, with more than 900 restaurants across Russia.

We have over 20,000 employees nationwide, and more than 1,500 of them already work in Pachca: all of our office staff, key contractors and restaurant managers. Our head office runs the entire chain. It opens and launches restaurants, handles centralized purchasing of ingredients, oversees restaurant performance and keeps operations running. To keep all of that in sync, you need a reliable, secure internal communication environment that connects every one of these teams.

Here's how we picked a team chat app out of 15 options on a tight timeline, and why we landed on Pachca.

Life before Pachca

Until 2022, Burger King worked in MS Teams. When the vendor left the market, we switched to Telegram. There simply wasn't a suitable Russian business solution back then. We took a close look at the market in 2022, but none of the products matched the quality of their foreign counterparts.

Telegram covered the basics, but it wasn't a great fit for business work. When your friends, family and job all live in one app, your attention gets scattered: you react to everything at once and can't separate personal from work. Security was a concern too. Sharing commercial terms in a public messaging app isn't what you expect from a work tool. And when an employee leaves, all those files stay in their chat history. Telegram is a world-class product, but it's a messaging app for everyday life, not for a corporation.

In spring 2026, news broke that Telegram was going to be blocked. By then, we had reviewed 15 Russian team chat apps and gathered all the numbers, reviews and opinions. Pachca came out on top.

A word on building our own. We seriously considered it, and we had the expertise, but we decided against it. Here's why: taking an open-source solution and turning it into a basic chat for one team is easy. Any IT department can do it. Turning it into a full-fledged team chat app for thousands of employees is a completely different story. To bring an in-house app up to the level of a mature product, you need a full-time team working only on the app for 2 to 3 years just to compete with what's already on the market. Ideally, that team would also have prior experience building a messaging app.

How Pachca changed the way we communicate

The biggest change isn't a specific feature so much as the type of system itself. We used to rely on a personal messaging app. Now we have a corporate environment where work conversations live separately and securely, with all contacts and work info about colleagues right at hand.

As for features, everything is in good shape. Cross-chat threads have really caught on with us. Before, looping an accountant or a designer into a discussion meant starting a new chat and losing context. Now you can @mention the right person right in the thread and keep the conversation going with your team.

Integrations deserve a special mention. The developer docs and the API are crystal clear. You could sit down and start building right now. Lots of people in our IT team automate workflows in Pachca and are very happy with it. Monitoring alerts, HR bots, collecting guest feedback: we're gradually moving all of it from Telegram to Pachca, and it's going smoothly.

What we're really looking forward to, and what we're missing, is delivery of the announced video conferencing roadmap. Across the market, every service leans toward either calls or chat, even though nearly all of them offer both. Pachca has a very strong chat, and we'd love to move all our calls onto the same platform too. That would make communication across the company even better.

Tips for making the switch

• Use a weighted scoring model. List every feature that matters to you, group them, set priorities and put it all in a comparison table. The more criteria you include, the more accurate the result. A subjective criterion works well too: have focus groups test the finalists and give their own ratings.
• Don't rule out options too early. The more solutions you compare, the more balanced your choice. Narrow the shortlist gradually.
• Always check references. Never buy a system without talking to people who already use it.
• Decide which feature matters most to you. Chat and video conferencing are essentially different products, even when they come in the same box. One service has stronger chat, another has better calls, and trying to evaluate both at once is nearly impossible: you might end up choosing nothing at all.