Why do phone numbers synced from Salesforce lose their country code?

Question

I tried to sync my phone number from Salesforce but I keep losing the country code. How do I validate a Salesforce phone number in Zendesk Support?

Answer

Zendesk Support uses E.164 telephone number format to validate phone numbers entered if the Validate user phone numbers is enabled in End users settings. However, Salesforce does not provide such validation in telephone numbers.

A valid international E.164 phone number must include a country code, usually an area code, and a subscriber number. To avoid phone number validation error in Zendesk Support during record sync from Salesforce, the phone number entered in Salesforce needs to follow the below format:

+[country code][area code][phone number]

For example, a phone number in the USA.

+15551234567

This format should be applied to phone numbers from any country.

Note: For USA locale users, Salesforce automatically detects USA phone numbers and strips out the country code if it exists. To avoid validation errors when sending data to Zendesk, add a plus sign (+) in front of the phone number to avoid the country code being stripped out by Salesforce.

For more information, see the article: Salesforce integration resources.