Apply E164 format to Phone Number in API

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.