Phones dialing wrong number from tel-hyperlink

Question

We received a complaint that some visitors to our website are dialing the wrong number to get in contact with us.

Our website has a hyperlink in the following form in the footer:

Call us at <a href="tel:+4712345678">12345678</a>

Note that the "+47" (international code) is NOT displayed visually, it is only included in the hyperlink. But now it turns out a limited number of people (circa one a day) is actually calling a private local number at 47123456. Not many considering the size of our business, but still a major nuisance for the family receiving these calls.

The people calling say they just pressed the link to dial.

Has anybody else had these problems? Is anybody aware of mobile phones that do not properly support the tel hyperlink? Any suggestions for a solution? (Apart from changing our or their phone number, of course.)

Answer 1

There are different ways smart phones pick a telephone number. some are reading the text of your website - some use the tag

on my first try: I would add the +47 to the displayed telephone number on my second try (or both together): I would replace +47 with 0047 (its norway - or?)

and before posting i got a third idea: which encoding has the webserver and which encoding has the html / PHP page in sourcecode? Both UTF-8 or something else? Maybe your server is sending it in a different way than the website is created and somehow some smartphones can't handle it correctly.

Answer 2

The problem here is pretty simple: this is the URL-Encoding.

The + char is an reserved character within the URL and represents an space.

To get an actual + sign replace it with the URL encoded version: %2B

See Links for details:

Wikipedia

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