The new auto-formatting and validation feature for phone numbers is a step in the right direction.
However, the current integration seems to be missing the mark with regard to user experience. I was unable to find any articles or posts in the Help Center announcing the new auto-formatting feature. The only Knowlege Base article that pops up when searching "phone number validation" is a detailed breakdown of editing default contact properties, and then there is only a reference to the validation and formatting being applied "automatically by Hubspot based on the country code."
This feature is certainly a step in the right direction, but several improvements are needed to improve the user experience and make the feature more functional overall (noting that recent comments on an "old" idea thread are already being discussed here; skip to page 7).
Suggested improvements include:
Global Setting to Enable/Disable auto-formatting at the account level - currently, the feature is enabled by default with no disable setting available
Global Setting to assign a default Country Code - currently, the Country Code must be selected manually for every new contact (see screenshot below)
Bulk edit phone numbers to apply Country Code format & validation -- currently, only able to apply formatting & validation when editing one individual contact at a time OR when adding to new contacts manually added (not via web forms -- this is needed, too)
Retain "number only" format for export and/or sync to other apps or integrations to remove non-number characters (parentheses, plus sign, spaces)
Default behavior of phone number formatting & validation when creating a new contact:
There are likely other enhancements that other users, especially those not based in the US, would appreciate.
I’m Ian, the Product Manager for HubSpot’s Forms tool.
Thank you all for taking the time to submit, upvote, and comment on this Idea. I'm happy to report that we are now enforcing phone number validation on all phone number properties as part of the new Hubspot Forms Editor. You can opt-in to the public beta here.
I agree this is a monster issue as we just imported 850 names from another system and we are now struggling to update all the **bleep** phone numbers. HUBSPOT Please fix this.
You gotta be kidding me with this much traction and this simple of a thing is not at least on the roadmap. We have a mess of contacts to clean up - about 9000, and something that could easily help speed the process up is a quick fix to formatting. 100% of our clients are U.S. Come on guys - give this the attention it deserves.
+! Posting on behalf of a customer - The workaround to re-import the numbers if the country-code is not listed specifically in the drop-down section is not very user-friendly.
We have found that by not having the correct data format that calls made from selecting numbers through Hubspot and made via zoom do not log into the system on a regular basis.
Being able to set this and backdate the change would be very helpful as all calls would be logged without having to validate each number before each call!
For such a platform, with such a price point - this is simply unacceptable. Since phone systems that integrate into Hubspot don't log the calls not if the formatting doesn't match - we are forced to reformat in Hubspot, which slows down the sales cycle by +20% - How did this ever get past the beta phase? If our platform did such a thing, we'd be embarrassed.... And no update for over 1 year!
But maybe when you're worth 25+ Billion, who cares huh?
This should be native as the basic automations for Name and Email formatting as they are offered by the platform in this route (https://app.hubspot.com/property-health-ui/... ) in every HubSpot account.
We're going at it the manual way with contact and company numbers. Unfortunately. Excel. Clean up. Number formatting to add the + and country code and then re-import into hubspot matching it up with the record ID. It's a process but no other choice...
Agreed! This is badly missing. For HubSpotters in Starter with no WFs this is a real pain if you import and then format +500 numbers manually. Awaiting a change soon!
100% agree. Our Aircall & Hubspot Integration is messing up CRM because of the phone number formatting issue. We have 25000 contacts in our database and there's no way we'll manually update phone number formatting on each. Would love to be able to configure phone number format based on the state or country properties.
We've also seen that when we send to our contacts the ability to update their records it removes the country formatting again, which means we then need to reformat again!
Please sort this out. We are missing alot of key data because of this one thing, which must be very simple to fix. Surely?!