The amount of tweets @adsense are not bigger than the tweets @klm. Still, KLM has a (terrific) webcare team, while @adsense never replies. Adsense revenue is slightly lower than Airfrance/KLM, but margins are propably 100x higher.
They don't support users because of arrogance. There is no viable alternative, they know that. And even if it costs them more revenue than the total costs of a support team, Google's culture is so accustomed to lavish spending that even 1B in lost revenue is just a blip on the radar.
True, but Google has Billions of customers per day whose margin is in the pennies, and a few hundred thousand significant account holders.
An account holder chosen at random is most likely to be in the former category, unlike klm where a customer chosen at random is likely to have a much higher margin worthy of a few dollars of support costs.
Some might argue a company should support a customer well even if doing so puts that customer as a lifetime lossmaker though.
> Or possibly the effect of having a user base in the billions. How do you adequately support that?
The same way Amazon does? How about banks, airlines and other similar.
I understand that there's little motivation for some online services to improve their customer service experience but Google is especially bad. Even when making a purchase from them (an area where both Apple and Microsoft do much better), you're dealing with a bot with absolutely no other contact point.