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Freshdesk New Phone Format is Ineffective with Phone Extensions

Related products:Freshdesk
  • November 5, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 65 views

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Freshdesk is forcing all contacts to have consistent phone formatting - great in theory, but in practice, it makes the phone numbers extremely difficult to parse, and there’s no way to separate phone extensions.

 

For example, a phone number could be 1-234-567-8901 ext 234, but Freshdesk forces it to look like +12345678901234, which makes it impossible to know how many of those numbers are the extension that should be typed in later into the call. I’ve seen extension numbers between 3-5 digits long.

 

The article states that the + symbol is allowed, but it seems to only be allowed at the beginning of the number, so it can’t be used as a separator. 

 

Please add the ability to add an “x” or some other symbol to separate extensions, and ideally the - symbol to make the number easier to read out.

 

2 replies

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  • Active Contributor
  • February 5, 2026

I’m having the same issue and it just marked close to 500 of my contacts “unverified” with a constant popup banner as well.   Really frustrating as it didn’t used to be this way.  

Did you ever find a workaround?


kzual
Active Contributor
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  • Active Contributor
  • February 19, 2026

Same here, phone numbers with extensions are pretty common in businesses. The fact that was not considered when Freshdesk started to enforce that format is beyond me and need to be corrected fast.