Phone Number is a dedicated survey question type for collecting a visitor's phone number. It behaves like a Short text question, but with one difference: it checks the format as the visitor types, instead of accepting anything.

What happens without it

A plain Short text question accepts whatever the visitor types — a stray letter, a missing digit, or a number typed as a sentence ("call me at five five five") all get saved as-is. That bad data then lands in your CRM, workflow variables, or a callback queue, where it's unusable until someone notices and fixes it manually.

What the Phone Number type does differently

• Validates as the visitor types. An obviously incomplete or malformed number is flagged before the survey can be submitted, not after.
• No configuration required. Add the question, give it a label, and it works immediately — built-in validation covers both US-format numbers (e.g. 555-867-5309) and international-format numbers (e.g. +44 7911 123456) automatically. You don't need to choose a format, a country, or write a pattern.
• Stores a clean answer. The validated value is saved as the workflow variable <<phone>>, available in routing rules, bot messages, and any downstream CRM sync the same way any other survey answer is.

When to use it

Use the Phone Number question type any time a survey field exists specifically to collect a real, dialable number — a callback request, an SMS opt-in, or any phone field you expect to search or match against a CRM record later. Clean, validated phone data at the point of collection is also what makes normalized CRM matching reliable — see Why Do I Keep Getting Duplicate Contacts in My CRM? for how phone-format consistency affects contact matching downstream.

When to use something else instead

If you need a stricter or different format than the built-in default — a specific country only, an internal extension format, or anything the built-in US/international validation doesn't cover — use a Short text question with custom format (regex) validation instead. See Adding Custom Format Validation to a Survey Question for that flow. You do not need any technical regex knowledge to set it up; there are ready-made presets for the most common formats.

Adding it to a survey

1. Open the survey in the survey editor (Surveys in the sidebar).
2. Click Add Question.
3. Choose Phone Number from the question type list.
4. Give the question a label (e.g. "Best number to reach you").
5. Mark it Required if you want to block submission without a number — optional, on by default; validation still applies either way to whatever the visitor does enter.
6. Save the survey.

No further setup is needed — the validation is active as soon as the question is added.