We have an integration with ActiveCampaign where we attempt to de-duplicate contact records by searching by phone number.
Since Phone Number is a string without any format enforcement or transform in the API, we often end up creating duplicate contacts because our searches for phone numbers using E164 don’t find numbers that are actually matching ie we search for 3609416974
but the customer has input (360) - 941 - 6974
or (360)-941-6974
or 360-941-6974
etc etc so we don’t find a match.
If standard E164 format was applied when searching phone
in the API it would eliminate this problem. We cannot reasonably add searches for all the “popular” phone number formats because they can vary so widely.