Why it Pays to Listen: Introducing Crosstab Builder

At GlobalWebIndex, we evolve by listening, and the products we build stem from real consumer wants and needs. 

Our customers are – and always will be – the reason we create innovative solutions and keep moving forward. 

There’s a reason we maintain a two-way dialogue with the people using our products. 

Tom Smith our CEO, founded GlobalWebIndex in 2009 on this philosophy and it’s as relevant now as it was back then.

Our approach to product design

No campaign is effective without understanding the fundamentals of who you should target, why and how. 

That’s why we build solutions to help analysts, marketers and research professionals understand audiences in granular detail.

So how do we progress from our core mission – helping people better understand their audiences – into something tangible? 

With simple guiding questions that underpin our attitude towards product design: 

• What are our customers asking for?
• What are their pain points?
• What will this product do for them?
• Are we solving a viable problem?

Crosstab Builder: a familiar product with a new edge

Asking those questions is what led to the launch our latest feature: Crosstab Builder. ¹

While the idea behind the tool isn’t new – especially, in the world of market research – as time passes, sometimes even the best and most familiar tools need updating.

And so, after numerous conversations with our customers, we took what was a traditional product and gave it a makeover 

We had one goal, which was helping users explore data with greater ease and flexibility.

That meant:

✔ Getting rid of unnecessary complexity
✔ Safeguarding the best of what users know and love to focus on what matters

The result: not having to juggle multiple programs to interrogate data in a complex and sophisticated way. 

You get an instant and intuitive look at the queries you specify, without the need for additional tools or having to leave the platform.

With Crosstab Builder, you can analyze, overlay and compare variables, in the same view.

Our redesign represents a modern, streamlined approach to the user-experience, which we’re proud to have brought to the market. 

Crosstab Builder is being rolled out gradually, and customers who’ve been among the first to trial it have shared what a difference it’s made to their daily roles; namely, that they’re able to bring more dimensions to their data segmentation than they could before. 

When describing her company’s usual process for data collection before using Crosstab Builder, Jennyfer Sellem, Research Manager at Discovery Networks International, explains how for more complicated runs involving bespoke target audience building, their organization would have had to use a host of other programs simultaneously, meaning they’d be switching between programs constantly.

Crosstab Builder has helped the team to overcome this issue:

“Crosstab Builder has made such a big difference because it has completely solved this issue for me. Plus, I love that the data is instantaneous.“ 

What to expect when using Crosstab Builder: 

• Get insights from bespoke audiences, fast: analyze large amounts of data in two-dimensional tables, known as crosstabs, with ease

• Customize the tool according to your needs: build tables using your own, pre-set audiences and a combination of our 40,000 data points

• View multiple queries and data points side-by-side: discover the intersection between rows and columns and explore the relationship between two or more data points in the same view

• Intersect anything and everything: cross-analyze, segment, or overlay audiences and data, for a deeper understanding 

• Save crosstabs or export them: refer back to your specific crosstab at a later date, or export the data to Excel and easily share it with others

And while we’ll keep listening to our users and making improvements along the way, feedback from Wei Zheng, Research Executive at France24 tells us we’re on the right track: “Crosstab Builder is a big move of GlobalWebIndex in terms of development”, he says. “It’s easy to get a quick overview before doing any further analysis.” 

“Now, if I do need to look at something in greater detail, using the functions “AND” and “OR” gives me greater freedom and flexibility than I’ve ever had before.”

Looking ahead

When inspiration strikes, good ideas don’t always lead to great products. 

Consumers want brands to listen to them, understand their concerns and act on them. That’s why we start with your feedback and work backwards to address it. 

For now, we’ve focused squarely on helping users unlock deeper insights – easier, faster, in one interface. 

As home of the world’s largest and most comprehensive survey on the digital consumer, we take our position seriously. Crosstab Builder was only going to work if our customers found it truly valuable. We’ll continue building solutions that actually work for our users, and we’ll do that by keeping our ear to the ground. Stay tuned for more.

¹ Crosstab Builder isn’t available to all our platform users as yet, but it’s being rolled out gradually.