What are the accepted phone number formats for Talk?

Question

How can I add a user's phone number in Zendesk? Can extensions be added for direct lines?

Answer

Talk's phone services route through Twilio. Zendesk systems utilize their guidelines for formatting phone numbers. Twilio's documentation recommends that you format phone numbers 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. An example is +14155551212x123, as seen in the image below:

If you have the Validate user phone numbers setting enabled on your account, phone numbers added to user profiles without this format will fail to save to user profiles. For more information, see the article: Managing end-user settings.

When the Validate user phone numbers setting 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 Zendesk will no longer automatically add the characters +1 or +. 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, Zendesk relies on the number in the E.164 format. For example, if a user has the phone number +1 (415)-555-1212 in the profile, it will not match +14155551212. Zendesk treats these numbers as separate entities. The best practice here is to merge end-user profiles related to the same customer with different number formatting variations.