Question:

How is the Country for a Contact determined if no Country Code is defined in the Contact Upload File and the dial-in code is shared with multiple countries?

Answer:

When Phone/SMS Numbers are uploaded into the system without a country code, Everbridge detects the country based on the dial-in code (for example, "+1") and phone number used, while subsequently mapping it to the respective country.

If the dial-in code is shared with multiple countries (for example, "+1" or "+44"), the Contact Upload uses intelligent logic that scans the first few digits of a Phone/SMS number provided (such as area or city codes) and looks to identify a dial-in code that is associated with a country stored in the Everbridge database. If the system finds the dial-in code it will then use the remaining numbers provided in the string to validate the phone number against the dial-in code. If there is a match between the dial-in code and the phone number, the system will successfully upload the phone number for the contact record and subsequently map it to the respective country.

In the example below we have four phone numbers, each associated with a different country that starts with dial-in code +44.

See how the system deconstructs the phone number string and allocates the phone number to the correct country.

When no dial-in code and no country code is provided, the platform will default to the contact record's country if there is a match with the phone number.

When no dial-in code, no country code and the contact record's country is blank, the platform will default to the Organization's country if there is a match with the phone number.

If a valid phone number is rejected, or appears with the wrong country flag, this can be related to validation settings rather than the number itself:

• The platform performs phone-number validation using an external library (internally referenced as Google Phone Lib). When new country codes, area codes, or recently issued ranges have not yet propagated into this library, the system may mark numbers as invalid or map them to an incorrect country flag even though the numbers are valid.

• The platform also checks whether specific prefixes/country codes are configured as accepted. If a particular code (for example, +340) is not configured, numbers starting with that code can be rejected as invalid.

Administrators can address these situations by verifying that the necessary country codes are configured in the Manager Portal under Settings → Member Portal → Country Code.