RB.RU

About the company

I'm Vika, editor-in-chief of "Kurs", an educational platform for entrepreneurs that we at RB.RU run together with Alfa-Bank. RB.RU is a business media outlet with a 10-year history and an audience of more than 2 million readers a month. Our team has more than 50 people, and we use Pachca for internal communication across different areas.

Life before Pachca

Since the very beginning, everyone at RB communicated in Telegram. When the partnership project with Alfa-Bank launched, our team joined the company too. One part of the team talked in Telegram and didn't know things could be any different. The other part had used Slack for years. I was in the second group: we loved threads and knew Telegram was a less convenient alternative to a team chat app. So we became the internal pests:

Let's pick a team chat app, because we can't go on like this

Our CEO was also one of the people who really wanted a convenient team chat app, so we decided to pick a service that would win everyone over and show why a team chat app is so much better than Telegram for work.

How Pachca changed the way we communicate

People write in Telegram less and less :)

Chats became organized and easy to read. The people who came from Telegram were blown away once they got how threads work:

Oh my god, communicating is so much easier now

And these were the people who had never used Slack and didn't really understand why we needed to move anywhere.

Beyond chats, work and personal life are now nicely separated. Everyone loved that you can automatically turn off notifications at the end of the workday. Now it's easier not to get distracted by messages after hours.

Surprisingly, we started having calls in Pachca. Telegram had calls too, but nobody ever used them. Everyone went to Google Meet and created links. Now I notice that some people just call right in Pachca. Somehow the culture shifted.

Our favorite team on one of our calls

Everyone also really liked group tags. Adding people to chats in Telegram was less convenient :)

Tips for making the switch

The most important thing is education. You need a person or a team to act as the internal "ambassador" for the new team chat app. These people need to be fired up about the move, learn what different teams need and explain to everyone why you're switching apps and what will change. I recommend demo days, and it's better to hold two: the first a simple overview, the second a Q&A about the new service.

Second, get the new app ready for the move. When employees switch over, they should walk into a "furnished apartment", with chats already created under the same names they're used to.

And finally, help everyone build the right habits and learn the new features. The best format for that is memes. Someone posted in the chat when a thread would have been better? Send a meme. Someone wrote in Telegram instead of Pachca? Another meme. Everyone gets used to it, and nudging people doesn't sour the mood.