Device Serial Number Format

[Tonja Witcraft]

Along with emails, phone numbers provide the most direct way to communicate with customers. Phone numbers are likely to play a critical role in the workflows of many of your teams including sales, customer success, and customer support.

You might think that choosing the right format, or ensuring that all customer phone numbers in your database are consistent is unimportant. At first, anyway. A phone number is just a phone number, right?

Using the wrong phone number format can slow down your team when they try to call prospects and customers, inconsistent phone numbers can break integrations, cause data issues between platforms, create duplicate records, and make your phone number data difficult to use manually.

You may not realize how many different ways there are to format a phone number until you start digging through the data and see all of the different ways that customers have entered their phone numbers. Everyone has their preferred format.

Then, there are many conventions for expressing the phone number. In some countries, they use periods to separate the numbers and improve readability. Some use dashes. Others use parentheses. Some use spaces.

They may use what is known as an international direct dialing prefix, also known as a dial out code. These prefixes are used to select a phone circuit for placing an international call. Countries may also use a national direct dialing prefix as well for in-country calls.

France is a great example of this. Previously, the country used 19 as their direct dialing prefix. They have since adopted the 00 standard, but both will still work when making calls from inside of France.

Today, the E.164 phone number format is the international phone number formatting standard across the globe. It was originally designed so that the machines could be developed to use phone numbers reliably, and that required standardization and consistency. In modern times, the E. 164 international phone number standard helps to fuel a wealth of services and software.

Using E.164 phone number formatting ensures that you have a consistent format that will be guaranteed to work with most software integrations. Your CRM, auto-dialer, or SMS software will almost surely play well with it.

Every CRM has its own rules regarding how data is stored and used within it. Some will have a standard format that they enforce with phone number data, others leave it up to the user. Some may even re-write your data to their preferred format.

Sales auto-dialers are a common use case that may have strict rules regarding how phone numbers are formatted. Numbers with the wrong format might break the integration entirely and require a lot of manual effort on the part of your sales team. This will slow them down and may cause them to miss communicating with certain prospects or account stakeholders.

Just like your CRM, each of these solutions will have their own formatting rules on top of the HubSpot phone number formatting considerations that users must already take into account. However, all of these solutions accept the E.164 international phone number standard, making it the safe choice.

Your main concern should be what happens when phone numbers outside of their accepted formats are run through the system. Will an incorrect format pause campaigns? Break the integration altogether? Cause issues with the software it integrates with? Require a manual fix?

Formatting issues with automated solutions can have a cascading impact on your business. An auto-dialer solution that goes down due to data issues could waste hours of your team's time, leading to lost sales and revenue.

Another downside of unstandardized phone numbers is that it can leave you open to situations where duplicate contact and company records are created, shattering the single customer view and making it more difficult for your teams to access the context that they need for effective engagement with customers.

One of the most common ways that this happens is through integrations. For example, a sales rep may use an auto-dialer from their phone. That dialer automatically updates your CRM, logging the call. The auto-dialer will scan your contacts by phone number to find the record that it needs to update.

But because the formats used between the auto-dialing software and your CRM differ, the dialer software creates a new duplicate record for the contact in your CRM. Now your sales and support teams have to dig through two profiles to have full context for their interactions with that contact, if they even recognize that the duplicate exists in the first place.

When you figure that out, then you have to decide if you are going to let the new data overwrite the existing numbers. With a consistent format, the decision is made for you. And you know that it is the right decision for your organization based on the combination of ways the data will be used.

These are the questions that you need to ask yourself and a great example of why something that seems as simple as phone number formatting is actually much deeper and more important than most initially realize.

If most of your phone number usage involves your team manually looking up a phone number and dialing, E.164 and other formats can be hard to read. There is no spacing or dashes to help people break the number up into memorizable chunks. That can lead to misdials, overlooked prospects, wasted time, and frustration among those that have to deal with this data all the time.

One possible alternative is to create a custom field that uses a different format that is more readable for manual applications. This may be the right choice for organizations that use data in different ways across teams or across the customer journey. Maybe your sales team uses an auto-dialing solution, but your customer support and success teams dial manually. Different teams may require different formats.

Ultimately, you want to choose the CRM phone number format that makes the most sense for your organization as a whole. Speak with your teams. Understand their workflows, daily processes, and how they actually use the phone number data in their daily work. Know the software and integrations that you rely on that uses your phone number data and what its requirements are. If you use several software solutions, research the formatting differences between them and what kind of issues those differences could potentially cause.

With just a few clicks, you can reformat all phone numbers for contacts and companies to your chosen format. Additionally, you can always use Insycle to reformat phone numbers automatically on a continuous basis, ensuring your phone numbers are properly formatted at all times.

Additionally, Uruguay eliminated national long distance calling in 2010, meaning that the country does not have specific area codes for each city or region, which is a unique formatting wrinkle that needs to be taken into account for domestic calls.

We worked with Carlos to create a phone number formatting template in Insycle that met his specifications and ensured that his clients would have consistently formatted phone numbers that would work with their dialing solutions.

To format a real phone number in the US, Canada, and other NANP(North American Numbering Plan) countries, enclose the area code in parentheses,and then hyphenate the three-digit exchange code with the four-digit number.

To format a real phone number in non-NANP countries, include the country and areacodes. Insert a plus signimmediately before the country code (no space); the plus sign stands in for aprefix known as an exit code, which lets you dial out of a country. Eachcountry has a different exit code.

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Many organizations need more than 2 "Phone Number" properties on various objects, and some objects have NO Phone Number properties available. Currently the workaround is to add a custom property with field type of "text" or "number" .... but the formatting is useless and confusing. It also does not work with any dialer tools.

I also need this. Kind of shocking that this isn't a feature to be honest. I just want to call one number "Work Phone" and the other "Personal Phone" because that matches our workflow. I'm just getting started with Hubspot, but this might be a dealbreaker for me because if this basic level of customization is not possible, what else will I discover I can't do later on?

Yes please add the option to create custom phone properties for example we have the company phone as company properties which can be something like a main H!Q line, then a contact property default phone number can be the local office where the contact works, then mobile phone if we have the contacts mobile line, but sometimes we have the Direct work phone number and currently there is no way to add that custom phone field, except as a text string, which is useless to use on the Hubspot Dialer.

The Format required for the Self Sign in with SMS recently changed and guests can no longer use the autofill on their device to enter the phone number or they will get a format error message. The captive portal gives no information on the proper format and the only documentation I know of for the proper format is page 660 of the R1 guide. There is no way that a guest will locate and read 660 pages to figure out the correct format to enter their ohone number.

I hope that there's a fix for this because having to enter a +1 or another country code isn't the most efficient method. It worked for me, but give it a shot. You won't get the autofill once you approve the request however. I just receive a text that I just copy and paste.

I can not for the life of me find where I can format cells for Phone numbers like excel. I'm having people enter in their info via a form and the phone numbers are causing immense discrepancies. Is there a way to format a column for phone numbers or selection on a form for phone number like there is for a date?

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