Assertion Partly supported AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Callens: Data-driven companies are 23x more likely to acquire customers

Karel Callens · The 5 levels of great customer analytics experience · Jun 28, 2023 · at 3:08

This episode carries Karel Callens's own address, with nobody on the show putting questions to them. It still counts as said, and it is kept out of every score on their page.

Karel Callens, founder and CEO of Cumul.io, cites historical McKinsey research to build the business case for data-driven customer software.

0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.7s

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“Data-driven companies were 23 times more likely to attract new customers, six times more likely to retain these customers, and 19 times more likely to be profitable.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

The claim, plainly

According to McKinsey research, data-driven companies are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times more likely to retain them, and 19 times more likely to be profitable than non-data-driven peers.

a quote alone can be ambiguous, so this restates it with the references and context of the conversation around it resolved. AI-written; the tape below the player is the source.

Assessment

The claim bundles three specific figures attributed to McKinsey research. McKinsey's July 1, 2014 publication ('Five facts: How customer analytics boosts corporate performance', analyzing DataMatics 2013 survey data) confirms two of the three legs: intensive users of customer analytics were 23 times more likely to outperform competitors in new-customer acquisition and almost 19 times more likely to achieve above-average profitability. However, the retention leg fails: McKinsey reported that these companies were nine times more likely to surpass competitors in customer loyalty/retention, not six times. The 'six times' retention figure stems from a common misquotation introduced by a 2016 Forbes article and widely repeated across secondary sources.

McKinsey's July 1, 2014 study reported intensive analytics users are 23 times more likely to outperform peers in customer acquisition and almost 19 times more likely to achieve above-average profitability.
McKinsey's actual study reported a 9x likelihood for customer loyalty/retention, rather than the 6x stated in the claim.
The 6x retention figure originated in an October 28, 2016 Forbes article misquoting the McKinsey research, which subsequently circulated widely across secondary industry commentary.

Checked against

[1] mckinsey.com [2] mckinsey.com [3] mckinsey.com [4] mckinsey.com [5] forbes.com [6] theceomagazine.com [7] keboola.com [8] sigmacomputing.com

"McKinsey" "23 times" "six times" "19 times" customer profitability "Five facts: How customer analytics boosts corporate performance" site:mckinsey.com "23 times" "19 times" site:mckinsey.com "23 times" "customer" "McKinsey" "23 times" "6 times" "19 times" "Forbes" "McKinsey" "23 times more likely to acquire" "six times"

assessed as of 2026-09-02

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Mentioned

data-driven companies McKinsey and company

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