Lamoda
How one of the largest marketplaces moved 5,000+ employees to Pachca
About the company
Lamoda is Russia's largest fashion, beauty and lifestyle retailer. We build tech-driven services, offer the best selection and help people navigate fashion trends. Our platform features more than 10 million products and over 5,000 global and local brands. We have more than 8,000 employees, and 5,000+ of them work in Pachca, including our digital divisions, IT teams, logistics departments and more.
Before the move to Pachca
Until 2023, our teams used several apps to communicate: MS Teams, Slack and Telegram.
The IT team used Slack, while every other Lamoda department communicated in MS Teams. IT had access to Teams too, but rarely used it: they preferred Slack for its features, easy-to-use interface and bots.
In 2022, Slack left Russia, and all our employees were left with one team chat app, MS Teams. That brought every Lamoda department into one workspace. But engagement in tech communications took a noticeable hit.
In MS Teams, just like in Slack, we set up all kinds of activities. We created the same internal channel for tech news and events, plus informal communities: chats for pet lovers, sports, cooking, books and more. Even so, engagement in the new app dropped noticeably.
Our general channel had twice as many members as it did in Slack. Yet reactions and comments fell sharply, even on really important news:
An important announcement in a general Microsoft Teams channel
A less important announcement in a similar Slack channel
On top of the drop in activity, we once again needed a Russian alternative, since Microsoft Teams could also leave Russia. So we started looking for a new team chat app for the whole company, one that felt as easy to use as Slack.
The moment we knew Pachca was the one
When our employees and management chose Pachca themselves. We tested the five biggest team chat apps. Each pilot included both managers and employees from different Lamoda departments, and at the end we ran a survey on which service was best. Pachca came out on top: teams loved the simple interface, cross-chat threads and quick reactions.
Farewell post in Microsoft Teams
First post after switching to Pachca
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
Many workflows in Pachca are automated through the open API. For example, that's how we create accounts for new employees, prefill their profiles and add them to their team chats. The communication structure is transparent and open: there are lots of public chats around shared interests and announcement channels that anyone can join on their own.
To measure results, we track Engagement Rate (ER). This metric shows how actively employees communicate in the app. If ER is low, employees find the app inconvenient for some reason and start moving their conversations to Telegram, which everyone is used to. For us, it's important that work conversations don't drift into personal messaging apps.
After a year in Pachca, ER on top chat posts and average ER across all general channels were both 3x higher than in MS Teams.
Over the past few months, average ER across all open channels in Pachca has been 4.4%, with peaks of 10–15%. That's roughly 3x higher than in MS Teams, where top posts in general channels only hit 1–4% ER. What helped were the advanced social features and an interface that's easy to use both for power users on our IT teams and for employees in other departments who value simplicity.
