IBS Dunice
How to choose a team chat app for an IT company with 500+ employees when your team loved Slack
About the company
Hi! I'm Olga, head of the IBS Dunice branch in Shakhty. We were the first in our company to switch to Pachca. IBS Dunice is a full-cycle software development company in business since 2012. Our portfolio has more than 400 projects, for clients like Otkritie Bank, Ural Airlines, Sber, Leroy Merlin, Anex Tour and many others.
We have our own training center. That way, we don't depend on the job market and can be confident in our developers' skills. Our Academy is for young people who want to grow in IT. We teach them to code, walk them through the fine points of development and show them how to communicate with clients and the team. The best of them join IBS Dunice full time.
Life before Pachca
We used Slack for a very long time, right up until it was blocked. We tried switching to Zulip, but it wasn't very convenient, especially on mobile. A lot of people said, "I don't want to install anything. Everything's perfect on my computer, I don't need extra apps."
So we started testing different team chat apps on the market. For example, in Shakhty we tested Mattermost and Pachca, and in Maykop we tested VK Teams.
Based on employee feedback, we went with Pachca: it was simply more convenient to communicate in.
The moment we knew Pachca was the one
It was important for us to add employees to several workspaces at once. Our mentors have students in different regions, and they can quickly switch between workspaces and talk to everyone. Our employees also liked that there were apps for every platform and they were easy to install. With Zulip and Mattermost, it was much harder.
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
Mentors and everyone who works with students started using Reminders a lot for small tasks. For example, as head of the branch, I can easily assign small tasks to office staff (like "Buy water") without jumping into a task tracker. We hadn't seen anything like this in other team chat apps.
If someone moves from one branch to another and their work email changes, you can update it in the settings in two clicks. But the most important thing is the Russian-language interface. No more sitting with a dictionary to change workspace settings.
Tips for switching
Don't try to move the whole company at once. Start with the most self-contained department so employees can give their own feedback on the app.
It's also important to make sure every employee fills out the contact info in their profile correctly. That makes it much easier for everyone to get comfortable in the new app.
