Name: Pachca
Rating: 4.8 (500 reviews)
Author: Pachca

About the company

I'm Elena, and I manage the technical assistants at Karpov.Courses. We're an online school that trains analysts and data scientists. What makes our approach different is the sprint model: we immerse students in a real work environment, real tasks and a real work format from day one.

We've been around for 5 years and are one of the largest EdTech companies*. We run dozens of programs, and 90,000+ students and 450+ companies have trusted us with their training.

Our team is fully distributed: some of us are in Saint Petersburg, others in Tbilisi or Istanbul. So a good communication tool has always been a must-have.

Life before Pachca

Over the years, we at Karpov.Courses used several foreign team chat apps. Each one served both as a team chat app for our staff and as a platform for working with students.

When problems started with our previous team chat app, we urgently needed to pick a new platform. So we reached out to every Russian service to find one we could roll out for our team and all our student-facing processes.

After studying the market in detail, we settled on Pachca and fully migrated to it in 2 weeks, from building LMS integrations and writing guides for the team to moving all our students over.

The moment we knew Pachca was the one

Pachca was our top pick from the start: we knew it had been rolled out at large EdTech companies. And our very first meetings confirmed that the team was responsive and understood how educational companies work. Those were the main signals for us.

How Pachca changed the way we work with students

We liked that we could keep the structure of student communication we already had. Our courses are made up of modules. Modules contain lessons, and lessons contain quite a lot of assignments.

Now, when a course starts, Pachca creates a channel named after the module. Inside it, messages with the name of each assignment are generated automatically, each with a thread underneath, so students can discuss the assignment with each other and with their mentor.

Each link to one of these threads is embedded right into the LMS. When students work on an assignment, they can always jump straight to the discussion of that assignment in Pachca to see how others solved it or ask an expert. It's convenient for both students and experts: the expert sees the full context of the assignment right away, even if the student didn't describe the question well.

Another thing we like about Pachca is the separate Threads section. It really helps me stay on top of every discussion I'm involved in. When a course starts, we automatically subscribe experts in advance to the threads where their assignments will be discussed, and we train them to work with those threads. With this approach, the accuracy of answers and the chance of missing a student's question went down.

How Pachca changed the way our team communicates

Telegram has always been deeply rooted in our team. Even though we already had other team chat apps and tried to use them as much as possible for team communication, Telegram was still the place where you could be 100% sure to get a quick answer.

The same thing happened with Pachca right after we moved. First, it was hard to bring over the part of the team that talks to clients in Telegram, for example. Second, people are used to reaching for Telegram. You get an answer faster there, and a lot of people start relying on that.

But over time, we've started communicating in a more structured way and discussing bigger topics in Pachca. It helps us "roll out" information to the whole team when we need to. We feel like there are more of these discussions than before, and now everyone has the context, so to speak.

Another thing that has definitely changed: the people we trained, and those who got the point of threads in Pachca, never miss any information now. That used to be a problem :)

Tips for switching

If you use a team chat app not just for internal communication but also for client-facing processes, it's really important to check whether the service has worked with similar companies and processes
Make a migration plan and decide on the automations you want to set up in advance
Write guides and keep them clear
For the first while, set up separate channels for questions and oversight to steer work in the new service in the right direction. Not everyone likes reading guides, and people will definitely make mistakes
If nothing else works, the most effective approach is to meet with the teams you're waiting to hear back from in Pachca but who aren't logging in. For example, we met with those teams and walked them through examples of how threads could make their lives easier: "scrolling through the Threads tab 5 times a day to stay on top of everything is easy and takes way less time than Telegram." Today I can say that the teams that had the hardest time adapting to Pachca are now actively communicating there and see the value.