Classact speeds up IT service delivery by consolidating communication, accelerating incident response by over 50%

Classact is an IT consultancy that designs, builds, and maintains IT infrastructure. The company — which is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan — was founded in 2005. Classact is powered by a team of 150 employees, many of whom work at various client sites or out of home offices on a daily basis.

Messages everywhere: Needing to streamline & centralize team communication

As an IT consultancy, many Classact employees spend their days working out of client offices. With the team scattered across many different physical locations, it was difficult to coordinate internal operations and give staff the resources they needed to do their best work. 

To share information and keep everyone on the same page, Classact used a variety of mediums including email, phone calls, SMS, and even a custom chat tool the team developed in about two weeks. Unfortunately, this cobbled-together setup left much to be desired.

“Emails required unnecessarily lengthy messages, took a lot of time to exchange, and often led to misunderstandings,” says Hidetoshi Homma, CEO at Classact. “The custom chat tool lacked a mobile app and notification features, so only certain people used it. This tool couldn’t attach files and had poor functionality and slow communication speed, which resulted in it being underutilized.” 

On top of this, the chat tool had a number of bugs, which required two or three hours a month to mitigate.

“Phone calls depended on the recipient’s availability, which often lacked immediacy,” Hidetoshi continues. “SMS had limited information exchange capacity, making it difficult to share detailed information.” 

Consolidating communication: Choosing self-hosted Mattermost for collaboration & data security

As Classact began looking for a solution to its problem, the team outlined its requirements. Most importantly, the company needed a solution with robust data security controls, since they were seeking to obtain ISO 27001 certification, which covers information security management systems. At the same time, the right solution would integrate with Active Directory for employee authentication and management.

After surveying the market and considering other solutions — including Slack, Rocket.Chat, and Chatwork — Classact ultimately decided that Mattermost was the ideal solution to their problem. In particular, the Classact team was sold on the fact that they could self-host Mattermost, it had a similar look and feel as Slack, and it offered robust threading and reaction capabilities.

“Mattermost meets both of our key requirements,” Hidetoshi explains. “It also offers advanced security features — like support for encryption during transfer, integrated authentication via AD/LDAP, session management functionality, periodic security updates distribution, and self-hosting capability — along with the ability to integrate with Active Directory, enabling safe and efficient user management.” 

Real-time collaboration made easy: Accelerating incident response time by over 50%

With Mattermost powering secure collaboration across a distributed team, Classact has been able to accelerate communication. In fact, the company didn’t even miss a beat during the pandemic because they were already set up for remote work with Mattermost. 

“We were able to minimize disruptions and delays in our work while ensuring the safety of our employees and maintaining productivity,” Hidetoshi explains.

Currently, about 150 employees across 30 business groups rely on Mattermost; coupled with external collaborators, their Mattermost instance has 170 monthly active users.

“Compared to when we used email, the speed of communication has increased dramatically, and the efficiency of information-sharing and problem-solving has improved significantly,” Hidetoshi says. “Specifically, real-time discussions on project progress and technical issues have become easier, reducing the problem-solving time to less than half of what it used to be.” 

Previously, Classact had “no choice but to use phone calls, emails, or meet in person, often missing the right timing and going over a month without contact,” Hidetoshi explains. Using Mattermost notifications, the company has been able to “significantly reduce missed messages.” 

On top of this, Classact uses Mattermost Calls for “deeper communication.”

“One example is regular meetings with teams of around five members, as well as one-on-one meetings between supervisors and subordinates,” Hidetoshi says. “Additionally, during chat exchanges, it’s also used with comments like, ‘It’s faster to talk, so we can jump on a call for a bit?’ As a result, engagement across the company has improved, enabling quick information-sharing among employees. Consequently, work efficiency has greatly improved, and the success rate of our projects has risen.”

In addition to improving team collaboration, Classact has also been able to bring secure collaboration to its external partners — which include third-party accountants, legal advisors, HR consultants, health-related consultants, and subcontractors.

“Before implementing Mattermost, we conducted all communication with external partners via email,” Hidetoshi continues. “Managing information through email was challenging, and from a security perspective, it posed significant risks — like misdelivery, eavesdropping during transfer, and virus infection on spoofed emails — which could result in a loss of trust from customers.”

A versatile collaboration hub: Using Mattermost across operations 

In addition to facilitating day-to-day communication, Classact uses Mattermost for:

• Business reporting. Every day, Classact employees report what they’re working on, allowing management to provide real-time feedback and quickly check the progress of work.

• Event notifications and attendance confirmation. The Classact team receives notifications about internal events and meetings on Mattermost, which also gives managers the ability to confirm, at a glance, which employees attended each meeting.

• Simple surveys. Management sends simple internal surveys through Mattermost, gathering feedback from all employees about company matters — like the desire to introduce a new platform.

• Checking project progress. Classact creates dedicated channels for each project, and those channels are used to share progress and quickly coordinate responses when problems arise.

• Company-wide announcements. Important announcements about company news and system maintenance are sent to employees from one central location, increasing organizational alignment.

Improving physical and digital access controls & increasing productivity with AI

By integrating Mattermost with other tools, Classact has unlocked even more value from the secure collaboration platform.

For example, Classact has connected Mattermost with SwitchBot, an office automation system the company uses to lock its office doors. As a result, they can open and close door locks directly in Mattermost using slash commands.

“This feature is configured so that only members of a specific private channel can execute it, ensuring security by limiting access to a select group of users,” Hidetoshi explains.

In March 2023, Classact engineers created a custom slash command to enable the use of ChatGPT on Mattermost “as a support role for technical training.”

“This allows engineers to get immediate answers to technical questions, thereby improving learning efficiency,” Hidetoshi continues. “For instance, it provides real-time explanations of network protocols and troubleshooting advice, supporting training and skill enhancement.”

Six months later, Classact deployed Mattermost’s Copilot plugin, which is primarily used for training and back-end office tasks.

“Most new employees use it during their training,” Hidetoshi says. “About 20% of employees are currently using it and say that it is very helpful. Productivity has improved. For example, employees who are not particularly skilled in programming can now create Python programs for data formatting that they wouldn’t have been able to create before.” 

Altogether, these integrations have enabled Classact to improve operational efficiency with Mattermost while strengthening security, providing an environment where employees can perform their tasks more comfortably, Hidetoshi explains.

Further customizing Mattermost to meet unique business needs

Classact has also leveraged Mattermost’s open source nature, customizing the platform to take care of several business requirements:

• Integration with Exment, a web database tool. Utilizing webhooks, Classact sends notifications from various applications and reports to employees on Mattermost. For example, when a supplier submits an invoice, a notification is sent to accounting on Mattermost. Similarly, when sales members input data into Exmet after a customer call, a notification is sent to a channel that includes all managers. “This enables smooth notifications of important information and follow-ups on tasks,” Hidetoshi says.

• Email forwarding. Certain emails are forwarded to Mattermost upon receipt, ensuring important project communications are received in real time. “This helps ensure that we do not miss critical information and can respond promptly.” 

• Chatwork message forwarding. Messages sent to Chatwork are automatically forwarded to Mattermost, freeing employees from having to hop into yet another platform to read messages.

• Integration with Zapier. “By using Zapier for OAuth integration, we notify the company on Mattermost when an employee posts on the IT knowledge-sharing website Qiita,” Hidetoshi says. “This promotes technical activities and knowledge-sharing among employees.”

• Integration with Zabbix. By integrating the monitoring tool with Mattermost, Classact can notify system administrators when an anomaly occurs in monitoring targets — allowing for early detection and quick responses to system abnormalities.

• Labor management automation. When an employee works long hours, they communicate the news using a specific hashtag. “When this message flows, a playbook for health checks is automatically executed for the relevant employee,” Hidetoshi continues. “This helps efficiently manage employee help.”

• Integration with environmental sensors. While they’ve since moved to a new system, Classact used a Raspberry Pi to notify the company via a bot in Mattermost when the carbon dioxide concentration inside the office exceeded the threshold. “This initiative was greatly beneficial for internal environmental management.” 

“Through these customizations, Mattermost has evolved beyond just a communication tool, playing a wide role in streamlining business processes, managing employee health, monitoring systems, and more,” Hidetoshi concludes.