Ignore Special Characters in Phone Number Search
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Nate Stanley
When searching for customers by phone number, the search should ignore special characters such as parentheses, dashes, spaces and periods as these characters prevent Protractor from showing exact matches, causing duplicate contacts to be created.
For example, if a customer's phone number is (123) 456-7890, the only way to find that customer is to search "1234567890" in the search box. Searching "(123) 456-7890" or "123-456-7890" will not provide any results. This causes creation of duplicate contacts because of user error which could be prevented with a more flexible search.
Darren Williams
Why not just search 7890? Or similar.
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Nate Stanley
Darren Williams: That's what we've continued to try to train our employees to do, but no matter how many times we remind them, they still end up creating duplicate contacts. Its more about usability, software that helps eliminate common issues. Most people have been trained by modern software improvements to take as few steps as possible. For us, that means copying the phone number from our CRM and pasting it into Protractor to look for existing contacts before creating a new one. A search that could recognize the most common phone number formats and remove the special characters would solve this issue for us, and it sounds like it'd help quite a few other companies who have seen this request as well.