Ultimate Education
How an online education group moved 560+ employees to Pachca from a Mattermost-based team chat app
About the company
I'm Maksim Sadchikov, and I run the IT back office at the Ultimate Education group. We're a leader in continuing professional education. The group includes seven schools in two clusters, wellness and creative, covering everything from psychology and nutrition to digital marketing, design, fashion and game development.
Life before Pachca
It used to be a total patchwork: every school in the group communicated wherever it could. Some used Slack, Mattermost or Bitrix24, others Telegram, and some even WhatsApp*. As a result, parallel worlds existed inside one company. Chats didn't overlap, communication got tangled and there was no shared workspace. To bring some order, we decided to move to a team chat app from a well-known bank, built on Mattermost. It seemed like the logical choice: a familiar interface, a paid model and promises of support and ongoing development.
In reality, the service turned out to be the same old Mattermost, just paid. We lived with it for a little over a year and ran into an insane number of problems. For example, the mobile apps were unstable. The app could crash while sending files or just lag badly on every device. The mobile problem peaked when the app was pulled from the app stores entirely. The developers promised to fix everything in two weeks, then in a month, but nothing happened. Then they suggested downloading TestFlight builds, which worked for a few days and kept needing to be reinstalled.
We hosted the service on our own servers and gave it plenty of spare capacity. It still lagged on every platform. And when our DevOps engineers wanted to fix something and turned to the documentation, it was out of date. The support we paid extra for either stayed silent or replied weeks later. We wrote detailed bug reports about features, but nothing changed. Simple questions got resolved, but anything a bit more complex left tickets hanging for months. Paying for a tool that doesn't evolve and doesn't listen to its users stopped making sense.
The moment we knew Pachca was the one
After the trial, it was obvious. We put Pachca through its paces in real working conditions and brought several teams into the test. Everyone's feedback was equally positive. People liked the interface and the fact that the problems we'd suffered through with the previous solution were gone. But support was the deciding factor. We'd write in the chat and get a straight, to-the-point answer right away, with no boilerplate. After our past experience, it felt like a whole new level of service.
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
Each school used to have its own separate workspace. After moving to Pachca, we reorganized things a bit. We brought the whole group into a single workspace using tags. Each school now has its own chats, but everything is under one roof. Every new employee lands in all the right chats as soon as they join Pachca: we just assign them the right tags. That's a huge help when you have a lot of employees.
When it comes to day-to-day communication, cross-chat threads made the most noticeable difference. We no longer end up with dozens of extra chats for every question. We can bring the right specialists into any question without creating new chats.
Tips for making the switch
Pachca's biggest advantage for a move is that, technically, it takes almost no effort. Everything runs in the cloud, so there's no infrastructure to prepare or servers to configure. We quickly moved over our integrations with the services we use, and from there everything just worked. One useful step we'd recommend: describe your main processes and the app's key features in your internal wiki ahead of time. That makes it easier for employees to get used to the new concepts and how chats work.
Otherwise, everything went smoothly, and adoption took very little time. If your team is used to complicated tools, switching to Pachca feels like a vacation: nothing needs fixing, everything just works.
- Meta Platforms Inc. (Facebook, Instagram) declared extremist and banned in Russia.
