Having worked as an Account Manager in telecoms for years, it has always been a personal bugbear when people put spaces in the middle of phone numbers. My annoyance stems from the amount of time I spend each day deleting said spaces that I have copied and pasted from client emails. I have to do this because our internal systems do not recognise numbers with spaces.
After discovering that virtually all of my colleagues have the same frustration, I wondered whether I could get away with kindly asking our customers to compose their requests without the use of these tedious invisible irritants? I reckon that I spend around 5-10 minutes each day deleting spaces so if you spread that across the company, that is a few hours that we can add to our combined productivity. Surely this is a reasonable request?
Unfortunately, after further investigation, it turns out that there are actual reasons as to why people put spaces to break up phone numbers (see below) so I have ruled out my first solution.
As Outlook cannot automatically get rid of them (I have checked), I guess my only hope is for our systems to be developed to account for them.
If anyone else has a viable solution, I'm eager to hear it!
If you’re displaying a phone number anywhere in any form of marketing material or on a web site’s contact page, it is important that you write the phone number correctly with spaces in the right place so your customers can read the number easily. There are a number of reasons why this is important: It makes the phone number much easier to dial Fewer Wrong Numbers It gives a consistent and professional image Local Presence & Recognition Better SEO
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