Auditing and Editing Phone Numbers

Before making manual edits to information, it is advisable to use DotAlign's audit tools to investigate existing information first.

Auditing a Phone Number

DotAlign gathers phone numbers from a number of sources, including your contact cards, emails, and information supplied by colleagues. While automatic systems such as DotAlign are useful, they sometimes make mistakes. Auditing is a useful tool to help you investigate and better determine the trustworthiness of any unexpected or missing information. Phone numbers, like all automatically collected contact information in the DotAlign app, can be audited to see relevant information surrounding it.

To investigate a person's phone numbers, go to the GET/api/people/{personId}/phoneNumbers endpoint and specify the person whose phones you'd like to investigate by providing one of their emails (or another valid identifier) as the input for personId. You will also need to specify which team context you are investigating the person in; this is usually "1", but may be a different number if your DotAlign deployment has multiple teams.

The API response will include:

  • Information about how many phone numbers are associated with the person
  • The digits of each phone number
  • For each phone number, its type (e.g. work, mobile), if known
  • For each phone number, a timestamp of when the number was last associated with the person
  • For each phone number, information about whether it has been flagged as out of use/no longer current

Removing a Phone Number

There are two different scenarios in which you might wish to remove a phone number for a person:

  1. The phone number never should have been associated with the person, for example if the number on a contact card was a typo
  2. The phone number is no longer active, for example if the person has moved

Deleting a phone number for a person will remove all trace of the person having that number. In contrast, marking a phone number as non-current allows that number to remain associated with a person - this is especially useful if colleagues may be familiar with the phone number and would be confused to see it disappear.

To make either type of removal edit, go to the POST /api/people/{personId}/phoneNumbers endpoint and enter an email address (or other valid identifier) for the person, as well as the digits of the phone number you'd like to remove from that person.

If you are deleting the association entirely, make sure to set the "NeverHadThisNumber" boolean to true.

If you are instead asserting that the number is no longer current for the person, set the "isCurrent" boolean to false (make sure to leave "NeverHadThisNumber" as false, too!).

Updating a Phone Number

There are two main scenarios in which you might wish to update a phone number for a person:

  1. You might wish to add or edit the phone number type, for example if the number was picked up from a signature block that didn't list whether the number was e.g. a mobile or work phone
  2. You might wish to confirm that a phone number is current, for example if you successfully reached the person today and want to promote the number towards the top of all contact numbers for them

To make either kind of update, go to the POST /api/people/{personId}/phoneNumbers endpoint and enter an email address (or other valid identifier) for the person, as well as the digits of the phone number you'd like to update for that person.

To update the type, select an option from the "Type" dropdown. To confirm the number is current as of today, set the "isCurrent" boolean to true.

Make sure to leave "NeverHadThisNumber" as false whenever the person has ever had the phone number - whether marking a phone number as stale or updating it (or even adding a new one - though we recommend adding new phone numbers via a contact card rather than directly in-app).

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