Google Business Profile chats sound like a feature you won’t need, albeit I can assure you this idea was incredibly helpful. With this tool, you could message a business from within Google Maps.
Can’t imagine how you’d use it? Think of a restaurant that you want to visit tomorrow. Instead of calling the restaurant for a reservation, you could just use Google Maps to send them a message if the restaurant integrated Google Business Profile chats.
It made communications between users and businesses significantly more convenient and straightforward, but like many other good things in the Google world, it now comes to an end. Google will remove the feature in July, telling businesses to integrate other messaging platforms for similar capabilities allowing them to stay in touch with customers online.
The first phase of the deprecation will happen on July 15, when Google will no longer allow users to start new conversations from Google Maps with a business supporting the feature. Customers whose conversations are already ongoing will begin getting notifications of the final July 31 deadline when chats will be removed completely. This is when Google will kill off the feature completely, forcing businesses to integrate other alternatives, such as Facebook.
Unfortunately, many people didn’t even know this great feature existed, and I believe the low adoption is why Google is now removing it. The search giant has never insisted on making this feature more popular and rarely talked about it, as if the company wanted the messaging support to eventually fail and remove it from Google Maps. The chat integration in Google Maps debuted in 2018, so it’s been around for approximately six years, but Google’s data probably reveals that few users discovered it.
Businesses interested in adopting other messaging services have many options, including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. However, an option integrated directly into Google Maps, which is where most people discover a business, was substantially more convenient for users, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see these businesses record less activity in conversations online and more people using the old-school phone for questions and reservations.
Google will allow customers to get their chats from the service using Google Takeout, but the option will only be available until August 30 this year. The company will purge all data on September 1.