Here at Arrowstream we provide fast, dynamic, and intuitive market research dashboards in Tableau. However, the secret power of our dashboards comes down to the way that we manage our survey data. 

A typical market research brand tracker can be in multiple markets, ask questions on hundreds of brands, poll thousands of respondents and do all this every month. And let’s not forget that brand lists and questions can change each wave too. Very quickly we have huge and complex datasets.

Our clients are also, and quite rightly, asking for more from their survey research; giving the answer as 42 is not enough. They need to know where the latest metric has come from in the past, whether it varies by segment, or is correlated to something else. We must therefore give clients the power to explore their data and not a pre-aggregated version of it.  

We thought long and hard about this challenge, and realised that there are even more complications around the problem, like how to also:

• keep the data secure and compliant with GDPR and/or CCPA
• deal with the different survey platforms
• work with different survey scripting styles
• manage the data without needing to upskill researchers in advanced data engineering techniques
• utilise advances in data technology
• add additional data that wasn’t included in the survey (for example for a brand you may want to add the manufacturer, number of social media followers, product launch dates) into the data
• create new calculation variables without the need for complex syntax.

Arrowstream created new technology to address these issues and to give our dashboards minimal load times and maximum flexibility. 

We know that there is another world outside of Tableau (we find this hard to believe too!), so we export and store our transformed survey data in Postgres. Postgres is the most widely used opensource database platform. From here you can pretty much connect to any other Business Intelligence solution, connect to your own data warehouse or integrate into other proprietary solutions. 

We are really honoured to be short-listed for this award.