Best way to approach user regarding phone number formatting?

Question

I have a text messaging web application in which users can upload multiple phone numbers through Excel or CSV sheet. However, I need the phone numbers to be in specific format (i.e. E.164 - the international format) for my application to work.

Now I can format these numbers programmatically but, I need to know the specific country to which they belong or else I might parse them wrong.

---

For Example :

A client once tried to upload a list of contacts that had numbers like this in their excel sheet :

203745xxxx

Now this is a valid number for Egypt, however upon adding the dialing code for US (+1), it becomes a valid US number too.

My client intended this number to be of US, but my application parsed it to be of Egypt thus he was charged on the basis of texting rates of Egypt.

---

Now this doesn't happen that often, however once in a while I have to face this issue.

So I was wondering what the solution might be without increasing the complexity of uploading contacts (many clients have very little technical knowledge and some of them don't even know how to format number in international format)

This is how my upload screen looks like right now :

The contact list they upload can consist of :

• Multiple contacts belonging to single country
• Multiple contacts belonging to multiple countries

Phone numbers might be in international format or not.

I was thinking of adding a checkbox below file upload control that says "Format Numbers" or something like that, and upon checking that checkbox, I show a drop-down list of countries, from which they can select a country of which the phone numbers belong to. But in this case, they will be limited to upload list of one country only which is not that desirable solution at all.

Or maybe, add two different tabs - one for single country list and the other for multiple countries list.

What do you guys suggest? What would be better in terms of user experience?

Answer 1

A country select is a very good idea.

I'm an international person. I live and work abroad, lots of my friends and colleagues comes from different countries, international phone numbers are totally normal for me.

A few years ago I remember an exchange with my father. He is absolutely not an international person. He has only been abroad a few times in his life and never bothered with phones whilst he was there. I told him my phone number which was from the country where I live, it confused him to no end how it could be a valid phone number yet have a "+" as part of it. To his mind phone numbers can only be numbers. This is only one man, I've not studied it in depth. But I do believe it could be fairly standard with older people.

Even myself, despite having to do such things a lot- I often have trouble remembering international dialling codes and how to translate a phone number into an international format.

So, what I would suggest you do is have a nice (optional) country selector for the user to say where abouts this phone number(s) comes from. Implimentations of this I've seen in the past usually include the nation's dialing code alongside the name/initials and flag of the country.

Let them know clearly that they're welcome to try without selecting a country but that for best and most accurate results, unless the numbers are in a proper international format already, they should pick the country.

There is also the possibility that the excel could have numbers from multiple countries. In that case...from the user perspective it seems to be a rather useless file unless they are already formatted right or at the least have the country mentioned by the number. To parse this would be more a programming issue than UX however.