When you think about the title of this post, the idea is counterintuitive, isn’t it? How can gaining a customer be directly related to losing a customer? Well, to put it simply, it all depends on how you treat the customer as they’re walking out the door.

A few years ago, I tried Smugmug. Frankly, it wasn’t for me. I wasn’t really into the gallery / photo metaphor and prefered what flickr was doing much more. Aside from that, I was sucked in to the whole “community” thing with flickr, and thought I would seriously miss it.

Fast forward to two years ago. I decided to ditch flickr, and the first place I chose was smugmug because of their stellar reputation and pro features. They were even offering a nice discount if you moved there from flickr; 50% off a pro account. With a pro account, you can do some amazing stuff; sell your photos, customize the galleries, etc. In the end, you can make smugmug your own and integrate it into your existing web sites in a way you can’t do with other photo sites. I shelled out the $80 and went happily along my way. About two weeks in, I decided it wasn’t really for me, so I sent an e-mail asking them if I could get a prorated refund. I didn’t expect anything, but after two or three e-mails, they gave me one even though they don’t officially do them. I was impressed with how they went out of their way to do the right thing for me, even though they knew they were losing a customer.

It wasn’t for nothing, though.

Two weeks ago, after reading some choice words from flickr’s Stewart Butterfield and seeing the heaping pile of fail that Zooomr had become, I had to go elsewhere, and only one site came to mind. Care to guess which one it was?

That’s right! smugmug!

Now, you may be wondering why I would go back to them if I didn’t like it before? Well, because now they’ve added a new dimension to their service: HD Video. I’m now able to keep my photos and videos in one place and the quality of the video absolutely destroys any other site you would want to compare it to hands-down. For what a pro account cost me, my work will now be presented in the best light possible and I’ll be with a company who values their customers more than any other company I’ve ever dealt with.

It’s been said that you can tell a lot about a company by the way they treat their customers as they’re walking away. In my life, I’ve had two really good experiences as far as cancellations, and that’s with Audible and with smugmug. In both cases, because they made it easy and did the right thing, I ended up going back to them in the future. Companies should take this as a point of advice: Just because a customer is leaving you today doesn’t mean they won’t have a need for you in the future, and your best bet is to make that exit as smooth and painless as possible. They may not need your service now, but they may in the future, and since every space is seriously crowded, you don’t want to be competing with others for mindshare just because you made it difficult to walk away.