Question on Hours

[Jason_Parks1]

I've seen a lot of plumbing companies list their Google My Business hours as 24/7. They technically have customer support answering the phones 24/7 The same holds true for personal injury lawyers. Yet their actual office is open 9 AM - 5 PM.

According to Google, it states the following for hours: "Provide your regular customer-facing hours of operation."

This seems like a bit of grey area as to whether a business is allowed to put 24/7 for their hours. I'm assuming if the plumbing company would send someone out to a job at 3 AM, this would constitute as 24/7.

If customer support is offered 24/7, is this considered "Customer Facing?"

I'd like to get some feedback/best practices on this. Thanks!

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Jason_Parks1, it's a real gray area. As usual, it's a gray area Google seems to have established intentionally, so that the bots can do their thing most of the time, while leaving GMB support and other humans enough space for "know it when we see it" judgments.

I've found that Google is very unlikely to overwrite (auto-update) a business's hours, especially if the hours don't conflict with those listed on the site. Your specifying 24/7 hours on GMB is more likely to stick if your website says the same thing, or if you don't specify your hours on the site at all. Though Google's had an extra-itchy update finger since the start of COVID, and has auto-updated other fields more than before, I haven't noticed a greater tendency to mess with businesses' hours in the GMB dashboard.

Google seems to have a much harder time confirming a business's hours than a business's more-bolted-down info (like address or phone), mainly because businesses can and do change their hours all the time, and without warning.

My definition of "24/7 customer-facing" is: if a customer calls at 3am, will he or she get a callback soon (rather than after 9am)?

Not that that matters much. Unless customers or competitors submit "suggest an edit" updates in Google Maps, you can pretty much specify the hours you want. For better or for worse.

 

[PKLilikoi]

@Jason_Parks1, it's a real gray area. As usual, it's a gray area Google seems to have established intentionally, so that the bots can do their thing most of the time, while leaving GMB support and other humans enough space for "know it when we see it" judgments.

I've found that Google is very unlikely to overwrite (auto-update) a business's hours, especially if the hours don't conflict with those listed on the site. Your specifying 24/7 hours on GMB is more likely to stick if your website says the same thing, or if you don't specify your hours on the site at all. Though Google's had an extra-itchy update finger since the start of COVID, and has auto-updated other fields more than before, I haven't noticed a greater tendency to mess with businesses' hours in the GMB dashboard.

Google seems to have a much harder time confirming a business's hours than a business's more-bolted-down info (like address or phone), mainly because businesses can and do change their hours all the time, and without warning.

My definition of "24/7 customer-facing" is: if a customer calls at 3am, will he or she get a callback soon (rather than after 9am)?

Not that that matters much. Unless customers or competitors submit "suggest an edit" updates in Google Maps, you can pretty much specify the hours you want. For better or for worse.

On point! Couldn't have said it any better.

 

[Lanerizz]

Jason thanks for posting this, have this exact same scenario and we're going to move to 24/7 hours. In the world we live in now Customer-Facing has a new meaning doesn't it!

Looking at the new More Hours options Google has provided, this may be a nice way to work around this.

Does anyone know what Access is? Would that mean Access to the building? 2020-10-09_07-52-33