More flexible phone number advanced filters

HubSpot Ideas
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1

Phone number advanced filters in indexes, in reports, or in AI prompts within workflows, all treat the phone number field as a string. All of the other characters that aren’t actually relevant to being able to make the call are included in the matching. One number we used the simple Search bar in the contact index, and got 76 results. Enter that same number into the advanced filter for phone number, and because of formatting it only gives back 7.

We have multiple phone numbers we’ve verified are from spam houses that otherwise rotate every other property to their form submissions etc. We want to detect other such patterns and act on them to root them out as quickly as possible. I want to save a report that sends me the list of contacts to deal with every week or so, without having to think of every formatting permutation, which is uninuitive anyway.

Proposed changes:

  • default to unformatted matching like the regular search, for intuitive control
  • have option for whether country code is ignored or included for formatted phone number entries
  • have option for whether non-numeric characters are included in the search
2

I think this is a very practical request. Phone numbers are a classic case where formatting shouldn’t affect matching, users care about the actual digits, not whether someone entered spaces, dashes, brackets, or dots. A good approach would be to normalize phone numbers behind the scenes and let advanced filters/search/reporting work consistently from that value. Having optional controls for country codes and exact formatting would still help power users, but the default behavior should match what most people expect.