Keeping marketing consent right, automatically

What was going on

Part of the £2M programme was making sure marketing and cold-calling consent was always up to date against the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), the Corporate TPS (CTPS) and the Email Preference Service (EPS). The existing process involved blending customer contact details with those lists by hand, which was slow and error-prone.

The business needed a real-time integration to update opt-in and opt-out flags in both Salesforce and NetSuite.

What I was asked to do

• Securely download the TPS, CTPS and EPS data from FTP servers
• Transform and store the datasets in a MySQL database
• Connect Salesforce and NetSuite to that database for real-time updates to customer records
• Build a weekly process to enrich the full customer dataset with updated flags
• Deploy to production with compliance auditing in place

What I did

• Used Jitterbit Harmony to set up secure FTP connections and import the lists into MySQL, structured for fast queries and audit
• Integrated Salesforce and NetSuite with the database, with matching logic on telephone numbers and email addresses
• Triggered updates when users access a record, so compliance is real-time
• Ran a weekly batch to refresh both datasets, flagging non-compliant records and excluding them from marketing
• Tested thoroughly in sandboxes, then deployed with monitoring
• Built audit logging, wrote documentation and trained the data management team

What changed

Real-time and automated updates meant customer data complied with the preference services, reducing the risk of penalties and reputational damage.

• Manual processes were replaced with automation, saving time and removing human error
• Detailed logs gave a clear audit trail for internal and external reviews
• The framework could handle growing datasets and future regulatory change with little rework
• Respecting communication preferences strengthened customer trust

Doing it responsibly

Consent was honoured strictly: nobody received unsolicited marketing without explicit consent. Data transfers followed GDPR, access was limited to authorised staff, and automation complemented human oversight, it didn’t replace it.