u/tresheasnitrha

When I first started paying attention to Google Business Profiles, I believe the hard part would be getting everything set up. What surprised me was the rest.

Little updates, talking to the customer, making sure that things still look right, nothing weird has changed.

None of it looks like a big task by itself but it adds up over time. For people who manage a GBP regularly, what ends up taking more time than you thought?

Operating a business has surprised me with how much time small recurring tasks eat up.

I figured I would be mostly spending my time serving customers, making sales or growing the business.

Instead, a surprising amount of time vanishes into little things that never look important by themselves. Follow-ups, paperwork, checking messages and all the other little things that for some reason keep popping up every day.

None of them takes very long on their own but they add up faster together than I thought. What is one aspect of your business that always takes longer than people expect?

One thing I keep noticing is how often customers explain the value of a business better than the business itself.

A lot of businesses spend time writing headlines, service pages and marketing messages. Then you read what customers actually say and the language is often much clearer. Things like: they actually answered the phone, saved me hours of back and forth.

type of comments will normally tell you more about what matters to customers than a brainstorming session ever will.

The more customer feedback I read, more useful phrases I come across that I probably would not have thought of myself.

Am I the only one who gets better copy ideas from customers than from brainstorming sessions?

Maybe this is just me but a few years ago I think a customer interaction was basically over once the customer left. Now I find myself checking for reviews all the time.

Not that we are being filled with them or anything. It is more that I do not like leaving them sitting there and I do not want every reply sounding the same copy paste response. Sometimes I will see a review come in and think "I will reply later" and then remember a few hours later.

It is kind of funny because the review used to feel like the end of the interaction. Now there appears to be something else to do afterwards. Did other people notice this or over-analyze the responses to the reviews?

I used to think about getting reviews all the time a few years ago.

What really surprised me was that when the reviews started coming in all the time I had to think about how to answer them.

If I got five or six reviews it was not a lot. After some time I found myself checking all the time to make sure I did not miss any review of my business.

I want to know how other people who own businesses do this.

Do you answer every review of your business or do you only answer some of them like the reviews of your business that you think are important?