Modernizing the payments conversation

Businesses in the hospitality, medical, travel and nonprofit markets have significant commonalities. In particular, merchants in these sectors favor conversational interactions with their customers. Realizing the power of leveraging these uniquely interactive business relationships led Everyware to embed its solutions in these markets, and others, to great success: this approach helped Everyware earn the ranking of 959 on the 2019 Inc. 5000 List of Fastest Growing U.S. Companies.

Everyware was co-founded in 2015 by Larry Talley and Scott Orlinsky, the company's CEO and COO, respectively. Their objective was to help resorts upsell to customers at an enterprise level using the Everyware two-way-text messaging platform and user-friendly payment gateway. The firm was initially based in Florida; however, its leaders later moved their headquarters to Austin, Texas, to take advantage of the area's strength as a hotbed for technology companies. "Company leadership quickly realized the platform they'd designed was not only working to boost Everyware's client revenue; it was also helping merchants reduce chargebacks and refunds, and improve customer service," Everyware stated.

Text plus payments

Everyware's stated mission is to, "help companies connect with and collect payments more easily from customers." Adhering to this directive, Everyware uses a custom-built conversational payment gateway to send automated text receipts from merchants to customers after purchases to authorize and validate the payment and prevent fraud. This interaction also enables merchants to establish a comfortable, text-based relationship with customers, opening a two-way communication that adds text messaging to the merchant's purchasing process.

"Our unique, integrated platform combines text messaging and payments to offer an easy way to boost revenue and improve customer service for merchants," Talley said.

Contributions, dues and more

Everyware enables nonprofits, religious organizations and public entities to collect contributions, membership dues, utility payments, and taxes and fees through text messaging. In addition, merchants can correspond with customers via text to alert them about outages and opportunities. Collection centers use the Everyware platform to collect debts for clients; the Everyware solutions are also used by home service providers, professionals and consultants to schedule, bill, and collect for services.

Everyware prides itself on its messaging platform's robust and unique combination of features. "Plenty of companies support two-way texting between customers and businesses; some have pay-by-text options, event scheduling and reminder features; some offer artificial intelligence messaging; and some are PCI or HIPAA compliant," a company statement noted. "Nowhere else, except for Everyware will you find all of these capabilities available in one platform."

Focus on healthcare

In the healthcare market, where providers have used the company's messaging solution to engage patients for years, Everyware recently took steps to become certified as compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). According to the company's November 2019 press release about this, Everyware's HIPAA-compliant solution "offers a convenient way for patients to pay and increases operational efficiencies for healthcare organizations."

"We've created the ability for providers to send patient invoices, reminders, collect payments and provide receipts all through text message," Talley added. "This directly translates to increased collections and additional revenue." He also believes Everyware's certification and ongoing patient engagement capabilities will enable his company to see significant growth in the healthcare market in the near future. Future of business conversations Talley also feels that Everyware is well-positioned to continue to exploit emerging technologies and means of communication, as well as poised to add capabilities to its offerings that enable merchants to continue seamlessly interacting with customers. "Businesses are just scratching the surface with how they can utilize mobile devices to communicate, support, and transact with their customers," Talley said. "There are endless use cases in every vertical, and we're ready and able to help all of them."

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