Genezis
How an amoCRM integrator left Discord and moved its team to Pachca in a day. An IT company's migration to a team chat app
About the company
I'm Alexey, a business analyst at Genezis. We build and implement IT solutions that help companies sell more: we automate sales departments on amoCRM and develop our own products, more than 65 widgets and integrations that we also offer to clients. We cover the full cycle, from implementation from scratch to ongoing support. Often we plug into a system the client already has and adapt it to their processes. Our team is about 50 people.
Life before Pachca
We tried lots of services and settled on Discord for a long time. We liked how it groups chats: everything is organized by topic, access rights are assigned, it's all tidy. But it's a foreign service, blocking started, and we went looking for a replacement.
Next up was Russian platform N. Stability wasn't its strong suit. Notifications came through with errors, and people simply didn't see some messages: someone would message a colleague, and the colleague had no idea. At some point, we'd had enough.
So I looked into about twenty services and picked five. I put together a test group of 5–10 people, made a table, and we went through each one, listing pros and cons. First and foremost, we were looking for what we were used to: a Discord-style chat structure and solid people management with roles, job titles and access rights. Pachca had more pros than any alternative. I took that table to leadership, and they made the call quickly.
The moment we knew we wanted to stay
We didn't find a single bug during testing. Stability was 10 out of 10: no lag, no crashes. Even when other things were down, Pachca kept working. Our biggest discovery was cross-chat threads: a discussion moves into a thread and doesn't clutter the main chat, and you can bring any colleague into it. For our work, that's the most important feature.
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
We carried over our chat structure almost one to one. We didn't move the messages. Instead, we recreated the chats, made the names consistent and grouped them by department.
We labeled employees across the company with group tags: we created a tag for each department and added people by tag instead of one at a time. There's almost no manual work left.
Besides threads, we've come to love custom statuses. It seems like a small thing, but you can instantly see who's where. Same goes for notification settings: you can mute a noisy chat and only get alerts when someone mentions you.
We also set up a webhook from our support system: when a new request comes in or a report on requests is ready, a bot posts a message right in the chat.
Today, all work questions get resolved in Pachca. Telegram and other messaging apps are only for talking to clients. We don't use them inside the team.
Tips for making the switch
The whole move took about a day. First we moved the chat structure, then employees signed up, and that was it. Nobody had any trouble, since the interface is intuitive. I contacted support a couple of times during rollout.
Here's what I'd recommend:
- Don't drag your chat history along. We didn't move any messages at all. We recreated the chats and cleaned up the names while we were at it.
- Set up tags before you create chats. Then adding employees is a single action, not a list of fifty names.
- Set aside a few minutes for personal setup. Everyone configures pinned chats, folders and notifications for themselves, so show your team how it's done.
