Is there any way to avoid this at a company where huge scale of 'free' products is the norm? It doesn't seem feasible to provide proper customer service in that business model, and that business model seems to be where things are headed...
I know its a coarse metric, but in the "Twitter should have paid ad-free Pro accounts!" conversations, people always point out that if you look at Twitter's userbase versus its valuation, customers are worth more to Twitter as advertising eyeballs than customers would be willing to pay to become ad-free subscribers.
If that's the case -- if people are actually worth more to the company "for free" -- then the company should take care of those users when they try to leave.
I don't know if that metric actually holds water, even in the Twitter examples where it's frequently used, but the point remains that while customers aren't directly paying money for Google services, they are not without value when it comes to Google functioning. Google isn't offering its services to the public as a public service.
If Google doesn't want to be in this business (because customer service is NOT one of their strengths) they could work deals with 3rd parties who would be glad to provide "customer support" for Google. But they'd have to be willing to talk to the 3rd parties. If they are willing to talk to NO ONE, then we wind up with situations like this one.
For the customer? Well, you can try to write a story and tweet it around, and hope someone notices.