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Telephone number should be considered as a unique identifier



Posted Jan 18, 2024

Currently, the telephone number is not a unique identifier and therefore the contact generated by a Whatsapp message duplicates the user.

As the email is the only unique identifier, but is not a mandatory information, there's no way to avoid this duplication.

I suggest implementing this option of phones also being unique identifiers.


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5 comments

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Hello Jéssica, thank you for taking the time to provide us with your feedback.
 
Can I point you in the direction of our product feedback template? This template has been designed by community members and PM's to help users provide the most accurate details for their feature request so that we can better understand your use case and needs. If you could, we would appreciate you taking the time to update your post and utilize the template to add information like business impact from this lack of functionality and how often you run into this issue. 
 
For others who may be interested in this feature request, please add your support by upvoting this post and/or adding your use case to the comments below. Thank you again!

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Make phone a unique end-user identifier

In my case, when creating a user with a phone number to send a message via Whatsapp, I can send the message, but when responding, a new user is created for the customer. The number is exactly the same.
Therefore, every day, when contacting us via WhatsApp (one of our most important channels), my agents are unable to identify customers, who, although they were initially contacted by us, respond disconnectedly, without identification.
It was necessary to create custom bot responses for each agent in order to correctly target the agent.

I am currently having this problem and, when contacting the support team, I was informed that this happens because currently the only unique identifier is the email, therefore the behavior of duplicating WhatsApp contacts is expected.

It would be important to consider, in addition to email, also the telephone number as a unique identifier for end users.
Currently, only email is available, but it is not mandatory, which makes the process vulnerable and makes the agent's work very complex.

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Thank you Jéssica! This is great additional detail, we appreciate it!

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James Hanley

Zendesk Product Manager

Hey Jéssica G. Bigon, James here from the Zendesk product team,

Can I confirm if you turn on the Validate user phone numbers it resolves the issue?

This setting will force new users to have a correctly formatted E.164 phone number that should match the format from WhatsApp and thus stop the duplicate user. Some more information on E.164 phone numbers for Zendesk.

Please note, with this setting turned on, creating users with incorrectly formatted phone numbers will cause errors.

You can enable this setting by going to Admin Center > People > End Users and selecting the Validate user phone numbers setting.

I hope this helps.

James

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Hello James

Thank you for the comment, but it's not working.

The system limit only input a new phone number without area code, but there's no no impediment to placing it without +country code.

Furthermore, the problem was identified the first time when completely adding the phone number. The duplication was generated with the same phone number and format.

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