How Google Chat became Paack’s hub for communication and collaboration

Paack migrated 800 employees and 300 channels from Slack to Google Chat in just three weeks.

Snapshot: Paack, a last-mile delivery service in Europe, gained efficiency and productivity by migrating from Slack to Google Chat. Read on to learn how Chat helps Paack:

• Consolidate costs within its existing Google Workspace licenses

• Simplify communications and workplace management solutions

• Provide more seamless and secure collaboration

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The mission and the challenge

Beyond taking shipments from point A to B, Paack is committed to providing advanced, tech-enabled, and sustainable delivery solutions to our clients across Italy, France, Portugal, and Spain. We’re always seeking innovative ways to communicate, collaborate, and serve our customers, which is why we run on Google Cloud and have worked with Google Workspace since our founding in 2015.

With Workspace, we have access to robust, agile collaboration tools that enable rapid innovation across our highly distributed teams. But historically, we still relied on external tools for certain functions—like Slack for instant messaging—which became costly and inefficient, and didn’t provide the level of security we needed. So in early 2024, we consolidated our messaging solution into Workspace. Paack migrated 800 employees and 300 channels from Slack to Google Chat in just three weeks.

The switch to Google Chat

In the logistics business, cost and resource optimization are key elements in meeting profitability objectives. When evaluating whether we should switch to Chat, we had three key priorities:

• Cost efficiency: Since Chat is included with our Workspace licenses, we would incur no additional costs by switching.

• Integration with other apps: As a component of Workspace, Chat integrates seamlessly with the entire suite, enabling more streamlined communication and possibilities for future AI integrations. 

• Security: Previously, we had to manage user provisioning, authentication, and permissions on two separate platforms—but Chat is backed by built-in security features in Workspace, making it easier than ever to handle security, identity and access management, and compliance.

After identifying Chat as the right tool for us, we began our migration. But aside from simply moving conversations and users, we first had to develop code to read all the configurations we had in Slack—including public and private channels, members, and admins—to recreate the same membership structure in Chat. With the launch of the Google Chat APIs and Chat migration APIs, our migration tool was able to do exactly that in just three weeks, without users losing access to any spaces.

Since so many of our processes are managed via instant messaging, Chat has now become one of our most important internal tools. For example, when a warehouse shift ends, the manager must submit a report documenting any incidents that occurred. Previously, these manual reports were sent through Slack, but during the migration to Chat, we discovered we could improve the process with Google Forms.

We converted the incident report form into Forms, then wrote a simple Google Apps Script code to integrate it with the appropriate Chat space. The data automatically transfers to Google Sheets and is then ingested into BigQuery, the Google Cloud data warehouse. We can then explore that data in Looker, a business intelligence platform from Google Cloud, turning Chat into a powerful part of our insights machine.

To further enhance our incident management capabilities, we recently built a Chat app to monitor network status, the status of all IT applications, and any help desk tickets assigned to our team. Since Chat apps work across web and mobile, we have essentially built a monitoring system inside of Chat and can access this from wherever we are.

Looking ahead

When changing up your tech stack, it’s not enough to simply say, “Stop using that and start using this.” It takes planning, training, and ongoing support to make sure people feel comfortable during and after the switch. As we migrated to Chat, we offered hands-on training to show people how they could use the new tool, and we created specific spaces where users could ask questions. As with all successful change management, it came down to communication and maintaining the community we’ve always fostered at Paack.

With Google Chat as the cornerstone of our internal communication, we're excited to explore its potential as an ongoing interface for business operations. By embracing new features like Vertex AI Agent Builder and automatic translation, we see Google Chat becoming a central tool for streamlining processes, supporting internal access requests, fostering collaboration across languages, and ultimately propelling Paack's innovation engine forward.