Phone Number Recognition in Integrations

About International phone number standards

The CRM Service supports several widely accepted phone number standard formats:

About the use of wildcard characters when searching for phone numbers

In case the backend system of the customer uses wildly different phone number formats than the E164 format and no fixed formats are used, it will often be necessary to use a wild card search on a phone number. This usually translates to using the national phone number part of the phone number received in the UCC (the full E164 format phone number minus the international land code), and then use wild cards between each number as well at the start and the end. So phone number +31614440216 would translate to %6%1%4%4%4%0%2%1%6%.

The wildcards (%) in this format ensure that separator symbols like dots, underscores, spaces etc. are ignored. Using a wild card search however is an expensive search. A "like" search with wild cards could use more resources and could take a lot more time to complete than an "equals" search with all phone numbers in the same format. It also requires additional checks to verify if the retrieved records really are a match, because a match returned by the wild card search does not have to be a real match. The land code could be different for instance. It will often be necessary to check if the phone number in the retrieved record and the phone number received in the UCC are truly a match. Some backend systems also do not allow such an extensive search with a wild card between each digit.

About Phone Number Patterns

In case the backend system used by the CTI system does support fixed phone number formats, but not the E164 format, the phone number received in the UCC could potentially be formatted to the correct format. This format can be described as a pattern based on the country code and the national phone number.

The following examples explain how number formats can display:

Example: Format with more spaces

• Phone number in E.164 format: +48227860243

• Phone number format used in the back end system: +48 22 7860243

Pattern to change the phone number to the supported format:

+[country_code] [national_number]{0,2} [national_number]{2}

• The first part of the pattern +[country_code] retrieves the country code from the phone number. In this case this translates to +48.
• Between the first part of the pattern and the second part is a space. This also translates to a space in the phone number format.
• The second part of the pattern [national_number]{0,2} uses the first 2 digits of the national number. This translates in the example above to 22. The 2 patterns parts combined translate to +48 22.
• Between the second part of the pattern and the last part is a space. This also translates to a space in the phone number format.
• The last part of the pattern [national_number]{2} retrieves all digits from the national number beyond the second digit.

Example: Land code starting with 00 instead of +

• Phone number in E.164 format: +49768147404
• Phone number used in the backend system: 0049 7681 47404

Pattern to change the phone number to the supported format:

00[country_code] [national_number]{0,4} [national_number]{4}

Example: Hyphen in phone number format

• Phone number in E.164 format: +492242916590

• Phone number used in the backend system: +49 2242 91659-0

Pattern to change the phone number to the supported format:

+[country_code] [national_number]{0,4} [national_number]{4,5}-[national_number]{9}

The benefit of using one or multiple phone number patterns are:

• It still allows to do an equals search on phone numbers without wild cards which means more efficient searches in the backend systems of the customer than using a wild card search.
• It allows for more flexibility to deal with phone number formats that are not supported out of the box.