When 'It Was a Year Ago' Was Actually Last Month: A SaaS Retention Campaign Mistake
A real-world example of Telescoping effect in action
Context
A mid-stage SaaS company was preparing a customer retention and pricing-clarity email for active subscribers. The product and marketing leads relied on their recollection of past communications rather than checking the CRM send history. The team believed the last major pricing/renewal communication was over a year ago and therefore assumed customers would welcome a reminder.
Situation
The product manager proposed re-sending a broad pricing/renewal reminder to the entire active customer base, arguing it had been long enough that customers no longer remembered the previous notice. Because the team members' memories placed the prior campaign much farther in the past than it actually was, they skipped a data audit and deployed the mass email to 150,000 users. The email was identical in tone and content to the message sent months earlier.
The bias in action
Team members exhibited the telescoping effect by misremembering the timing of the prior campaign as much older than it was, which reduced their concern about repetition. That distorted recollection lowered the perceived cost of sending another message and increased confidence that customers would not feel over-contacted. As a result, they treated the decision as routine rather than as potentially risky and bypassed a routine check of the CRM send dates. The mismatch between memory and the objective timeline led to a false assumption that customer fatigue would be minimal.
Outcome
Within 48 hours of the send, customer support tickets spiked and many customers reported receiving the same notice weeks earlier. Over the following month the company saw an above-baseline churn increase and a drop in customer satisfaction scores. The marketing team had to pause the campaign, send apology follow-ups to a subset of customers, and allocate engineering and support time to handle complaints.
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