Question
How must phone numbers for users be formatted to work with Zendesk Talk? Can we add extensions for direct lines?
Answer
As Talk runs through Twilio, our systems utilize their guidelines for formatting numbers. Per Twilio's documentation: Phone numbers should be formatted with the internationally standardized E.164 format. E.164 numbers can have a maximum of fifteen digits and are usually written as follows: [+][country code][subscriber number including area code].
An example of a US number in the E.164 format is +16175551212.
To add an extension to a user's phone number, append an x and the extension to the end of the phone number like so:
- +14155551212x123
If you have the Validate user phone numbers setting enabled on your account, phone numbers added to user profiles that don't conform to this format will fail to save to user profiles. You can read more about this here: Managing end-user settings.
When Validate user phone numbers is turned off, no formatting will be applied to the number added in the Phone field for a user even when setting that number as a direct line. This means that ‘+1’ or ‘+’ will no longer be added automatically and special characters such as (), or additional spaces in the number, will not be removed.
When Validate user phone numbers is turned off, no formatting will be applied to the number added in the Phone field for a user even when setting that number as a direct line. This means that ‘+1’ or ‘+’ will no longer be added automatically and special characters such as (), or additional spaces in the number, will not be removed.
Important: To automatically associate incoming calls with the correct user profile, we rely on the number to be in the E.164 format. If a user has +1 (415)-555-1212 in its profile, it will not match to +14155551212. These numbers will be counted as separate entities, and the best practice here would be to merge end-user profiles that relate to the same customer with different number formatting variations.
9 Comments
Are you sure this is correct?
We only call US numbers and when we try to make outbound calls with Zendesk integration through our cell phones we always get an error saying that we can't call international numbers.
In other words, all of your formats don't show using a 1 prefix and yet I am running into this dialing issue because our numbers are missing the 1.
Hi Aaron,
I've created a new ticket for you from this so we can discuss your particular issue here in a little more depth. I'll see you in the ticket and we can go from there. :)
Best,
Amie
I still haven't seen an email about this ticket... am I missing something?
Hey Aaron -
It looks like Amie did create a ticket for you on Wednesday last week; I've asked her to follow back up once her time zone is online today. Can you also check any spam filters or autofiling in your email to see if it came in but skipped your inbox?
What's the ticket number? I checked everywhere in my email.
Hey Aaron - it looks like it should be #2992916
Thank you. It got buried among all of my customer tickets :)
aha! Glad you found it. :)
Why is it that we're unable to choose how we see the number? I don't care how you save the number in the database which is actually all that needs to be formatted for your phone service. The front end for my agents should be what the rest of AMERICA or your local country uses.... that is IF Zendesk actually spent a minute on UI.
I'm hoping that with this thread being SO old that there is now a feature to fix this 2002 issue.
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