Your CRM is responsible for storing your mobile phone number data most important customer data. You use this data to connect with existing and potential customers, personalize contacts, and empower your teams to succeed in their interactions.
One of the most important fields collected in a CRM is the phone numbers of existing and potential customers.
Along with email, phone numbers are the most direct way to communicate with customers. Phone numbers likely play a critical role in the workflows of many of your teams, including sales, customer success, and customer service.
However, one thing most companies don’t realize until their CRM databases start to grow is that it’s not just how they store customer phone numbers that’s critical, but also how they’re stored. Phone number data can come in many different formats.
You might think it’s not important to choose the right format or make sure all the customer phone numbers in your database are consistent. At least at first. A phone number is just a phone number, right?
Well, as many businesses are discovering, even something as simple as phone number formatting can be quite important and complicated when we dig deeper.
The anatomy of phone number formats
You might not realize how many how cpg brands are redefining their approach different ways there are to format a phone number until you start digging into the data and see all the different ways customers have entered their phone numbers. Everyone has their own preferred format.
Telephone numbers contain several components. An area code. The telephone number itself. Sometimes, an international country code.
Then, there are many conventions for expressing phone numbers. In some countries, periods are used to separate numbers and improve readability. Some use hyphens. Others use parentheses. Some use spaces.
There may even be several different formats used in the same country. In the United Kingdom, for example, they use different formats for mobile phones and landlines.
All this results in a great deal of variation.
The international standard E.164 for the format of telephone numbers
Today, the E.164 telephone number our best selling database format is the international telephone number format standard worldwide. It was originally designed to enable machines to use telephone numbers reliably, and this required standardization and consistency. Today, the E.164 international telephone number standard powers a wide range of computer services and programs.
This is an internationally recognized format that will work with almost any software where it is important for those solutions to be able to recognize an international country code, area codes, and the phone numbers themselves within the data stream.
The E. 164 phone number format uses this template:
[+][country code][area code][local phone number]
Thus, a phone number using the E.164 phone number format might look like this:
+14151231234
E. 164 does not use spaces, hyphens, parentheses, or periods.
