What are the accepted phone number formats for Talk?

Question

How must phone numbers for users be formatted to work with Talk? Can we add extensions for direct lines?

Answer

As Zendesk Talk runs through Twilio, our systems utilizes 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 would be [phone]. 

To add an extension to a user's phone number, simply append an x and the extension to the end of the phone number like so:

• [phone]x123 

Note: 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. 

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 [phone] in its profile, it will not match to [phone]. These 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.