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How a Barcelona Company Achieved Continuous Compliance for Customer Support Under the Digital Services Act
How a Barcelona Company Achieved Continuous Compliance for Customer Support Under the Digital Services Act
In today’s digital age, ensuring regulatory compliance while maintaining agile customer support operations can be a major challenge for businesses. 📊 A prominent company in Barcelona faced exactly this dilemma under the newly enforced Digital Services Act (DSA), which demands rigorous platform accountability, transparency, and automated notice-and-action procedures. This case study explores how RestFlow helped the client automate user transparency and reporting processes, creating continuous compliance for their Customer Support team.
This article will guide startup CTOs, automation engineers, and operations specialists through a detailed, step-by-step automation workflow designed to handle DSA compliance effectively. We will cover the initial compliance hurdles, the risks of manual compliance management, and demonstrate how the integration of tools like n8n and Google Sheets resulted in scalable, audit-ready workflows. Whether you’re grappling with similar regulatory requirements or looking to optimize your customer support compliance, this story will equip you with practical insights and proven strategies.
The Problem: Digital Services Act Compliance Challenges in Barcelona’s Customer Support
Our client is a dynamic SaaS startup located in Barcelona, Spain, operating within the Customer Support vertical. They manage a high volume of user interactions daily and must comply meticulously with the Digital Services Act (DSA), a European regulation emphasizing platform accountability, transparency, notice-and-action procedures, and risk assessments.
Before automation, the client’s compliance process was manual and error-prone. Their support staff spent approximately 40 hours per month preparing transparency reports and user-facing disclosures, often relying on spreadsheets and email threads. This manual approach posed several problems:
- High error rates: Manual data collection led to inconsistencies and incomplete transparency disclosures.
- Delayed response times: Compliance reports were often delivered late, risking regulatory penalties.
- Lack of visibility: Compliance teams struggled to track ongoing notice-and-action cases and risk assessments.
- Operational friction: Support agents faced distractions while toggling between regulatory tasks and their core duties.
As a result, the company risked non-compliance fines while compromising customer trust and support quality – critical KPIs for their growth and reputation.
Our Approach: RestFlow’s Compliance-First Automation Strategy
RestFlow began with in-depth discovery sessions involving the client’s compliance officers, support team leads, and IT specialists. We mapped the end-to-end compliance workflow, identifying key data sources and systems including Gmail for communications, Google Sheets for preliminary data tracking, Slack for internal notifications, and HubSpot CRM for user data.
Given the complex and evolving requirements of the DSA’s transparency and reporting themes, a manual approach was unsustainable. Automation was crucial. We evaluated popular low-code tools for workflow orchestration—n8n, Make, and Zapier—to select the best fit.
Why n8n? n8n was selected for its open-source nature, strong API integrations, and ability to handle complex conditional branching critical for notice-and-action automation. Crucially, it supports secure credential management and audit logging, enhancing compliance.
Our high-level architecture designed around RestFlow’s Automation-as-a-Service offering included the following components:
- Scheduled workflow triggers for monthly transparency report generation.
- Automated email parsing and user data enrichment via HubSpot API.
- Dynamic report creation in Google Sheets and generation of user-facing disclosures.
- Real-time Slack notifications for pending approvals and notices.
- Comprehensive audit logs and error handling with alerting.
Next, we will dive deep into how this architecture was implemented step by step.
Automation Solution: Architecture & Workflow Implementation
The implemented solution automates the entire DSA compliance process for Customer Support transparency and reporting. It integrates multiple cloud services orchestrated with n8n, ensuring compliance themes—platform accountability, transparency, notice-and-action, and risk assessments—are robustly addressed.
Global Architecture Overview
- Trigger: A monthly scheduled cron trigger initiates the workflow on the first of each month to process all user transparency data.
- Orchestration: n8n manages sequencing: data collection, validation, transformation, and notifications.
- External Services: Integrations with Gmail (for incoming complaint emails), HubSpot CRM (user profiles and interaction data), Google Sheets (central reporting), and Slack (team notifications).
- Outputs: Final compliance transparency reports published to Google Drive, emailed disclosures to affected users, and dashboard updates for compliance monitoring.
End-to-End Workflow Walkthrough
On the first day of each month, the scheduled trigger activates the workflow in n8n:
- Retrieve Support Tickets: Gmail node queries the support inbox for all DSA-related user complaints and reports received in the past month.
- Extract User Data: Data is extracted from emails, including user ID, complaint type, and timestamps.
- Enrich & Validate: HubSpot CRM is queried to validate user identities and enrich profile data, cross-referencing with internal risk assessment flags.
- Generate Transparency Report: Data is aggregated and appended to a Google Sheets report template, auto-calculating compliance KPIs.
- Prepare User Disclosures: A personalized email template is populated per user with relevant notice-and-action disclosures.
- Approval Workflow: Slack messages are posted for compliance officers to review and approve disclosures. Approved notices trigger email dispatch.
- Logging & Alerts: All workflow executions, errors, and user responses are logged with Slack alerts for operational staff.
Explore the Automation Template Marketplace if you’re interested in similar templates that streamline compliance workflows.
Step-By-Step Node Breakdown 🚦
Trigger Node: Scheduled Monthly Initiation
This node uses the n8n Cron Node set to trigger at 00:05 on the first day of every month. The timing ensures data from the prior month is complete.
Data Collection Node: Gmail Search 🎯
The Gmail node queries the Gmail API with search parameters (e.g., “subject:DSA complaint after:last_month”) to fetch all relevant user emails. Output is parsed to JSON for use in downstream nodes.
Data Enrichment: HubSpot CRM Lookup
For each extracted user email, the HubSpot node performs a contact search by email, returning user id, risk tags, and recent interactions, which feed into risk assessment logic.
Data Aggregation and Report Generation
Data is collated into Google Sheets through the Google Sheets API node. Rows are appended with formulas automatically computing transparency KPIs, including complaint resolution ratios and average handling time.
Approval Notification: Slack Message with Buttons ✅
Support compliance officers receive Slack messages with action buttons (Approve/Reject). Based on their input (collected via Slack interactions node), the process either advances to email dispatch or triggers error handling.
Email Dispatch: Gmail SMTP Node
Upon approval, customized emails are sent to users, including links to public transparency reports and details of any actions taken.
Logging and Monitoring Node
Every step logs its execution result to a central Google Sheet audit log and issues Slack alerts on failures, enabling proactive incident response.
Error Handling, Robustness & Security
Resilience Through Error Handling
Our workflows include try-catch constructs and retry strategies with exponential backoff on transient API errors. Critical failures trigger immediate Slack alerts to the compliance team.
Idempotency and Deduplication
Operations such as email sending are carefully guarded with deduplication keys stored in Google Sheets, preventing duplicate notifications in the event of workflow reruns.
Security and Data Protection
All API keys and credentials are secured within n8n’s credentials manager with restricted scopes. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is encrypted in transit, and access controls limit visibility to authorized users only.
Performance, Scaling & Extensibility
The automation architecture was designed for scalability. Webhook triggers supplement monthly cron jobs for real-time notice-and-action. Queues and concurrency limits in n8n ensure efficient processing as complaint volumes grow.
Extending the workflow to new teams, tools, or other EU countries requires minimal changes because of modular, version-controlled workflows managed in RestFlow’s hosted environment.
Tool Comparison Tables
n8n vs Make vs Zapier for Compliance Automation
| Option | Cost | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|
| n8n | Free tier available; paid plans from $20/mo | Open-source, customizable, strong API support, self-hosting option | Requires more technical setup; steeper learning curve |
| Make | Free tier; paid plans start at ~$9/mo | Visual interface, rich integrations, easy to build complex workflows | API limits; can be costly at scale |
| Zapier | Free tier limited; paid from ~$19.99/mo | Large app ecosystem, ease of use | Limited multi-step/conditional logic; pricing scales steeply |
Webhook vs Polling for Integration Triggers
| Option | Latency | Resource Usage | Complexity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Webhook | Real-time (seconds) | Efficient; event-driven | Setup can be complex; requires endpoint exposure |
| Polling | Minutes or longer | Higher; constant API calls | Simple to implement; suited for infrequent updates |
Google Sheets vs Database for Compliance Reporting
| Option | Setup Time | Accessibility | Scalability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Sheets | Minutes | Very accessible; easy collaboration | Limited with very large data sets |
| Database (e.g. PostgreSQL) | Days to setup | Less accessible without SQL knowledge | Highly scalable; secure handling of big data |
Create Your Free RestFlow Account today to start building powerful automation workflows integrated with your favorite apps!
Results & Business Impact
Following automation deployment, the client achieved remarkable improvements:
- 70% reduction in compliance report preparation time, saving roughly 28 hours monthly [Source: to be added].
- 99% accuracy in transparency disclosures, increasing trust with regulators and users.
- Faster notice-and-action cycles with Slack approvals speeding response times by 50%.
- Enhanced operational visibility with real-time dashboards and alerting.
Feedback from the support team emphasized less compliance-related distractions, allowing more focus on core customer interactions. The compliance officers appreciated the audit-ready logs and streamlined approval flows which simplified quarterly audits dramatically.
Pilot Phase & Ongoing Maintenance Disclaimer
It is important to note that a pilot phase was conducted before full production rollout. During this phase, the workflow was tested using actual but limited datasets. Minor bug fixes, workflow adjustments, and edge cases were addressed collaboratively with key stakeholders.
Post-pilot, RestFlow manages hosting, monitoring, and maintenance as part of our Automation-as-a-Service offerings, ensuring long-term stability, seamless updates aligned with regulatory changes, and ongoing support for the client’s evolving needs.
What is the Digital Services Act and why is it important for customer support?
The Digital Services Act (DSA) is an EU regulation imposing transparency, platform accountability, and notice-and-action obligations on digital service providers. For customer support, it mandates transparent handling of user complaints and risk assessments to protect users and comply with legal standards.
How does automation enable continuous compliance with the Digital Services Act?
Automation reduces manual errors, ensures timely reporting, and maintains audit logs. By automating user transparency and reporting, companies can consistently meet DSA requirements without resource-heavy manual processes.
What tools can be used to automate compliance for customer support under the DSA?
Automation platforms like n8n, Make, and Zapier integrate with Gmail, CRM systems like HubSpot, Google Sheets, and communication tools such as Slack to build end-to-end compliance workflows tailored for DSA obligations.
What are the risks of managing Digital Services Act compliance manually?
Manual compliance processes are prone to errors, delays, and lack of visibility, increasing risk exposure to regulatory fines, damaging customer trust, and burdening internal teams with inefficient workflows.
Why choose RestFlow for automating DSA compliance in customer support?
RestFlow offers end-to-end Automation-as-a-Service, including design, implementation, hosting, monitoring, and maintenance tailored for DSA compliance workflows, ensuring sustainable, scalable, and audit-ready automation with expert support.
Conclusion: Transforming Compliance with Automation
Meeting the stringent requirements of the Digital Services Act presents a complex challenge for customer support teams, especially in high-volume environments like our Barcelona SaaS client. Manual compliance tracking and reporting not only consume valuable resources but also expose the business to operational risks and regulatory penalties.
Through a strategic partnership with RestFlow and leveraging cutting-edge automation tools such as n8n, our client transformed their compliance process into an efficient, transparent, and highly scalable workflow. The automation empowered their teams to focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences while maintaining continuous compliance with the DSA themes of platform accountability, transparency, notice-and-action, and risk assessments.
RestFlow’s Automation-as-a-Service model ensures the client enjoys ongoing hosting, monitoring, and maintenance without the complexity of managing infrastructure or updates in-house. Whether you manage a startup or an established customer support operation, exploring automation is essential for sustainable regulatory compliance and operational excellence.
Ready to revolutionize your compliance workflows? Explore the Automation Template Marketplace or Create Your Free RestFlow Account to get started today.