Phones that dialed the wrong number from tel-hyperlink

Question

We received a complaint that some visitors to our site are dialing the wrong number to contact us.

Our site has a hyperlink in the following form:

Call us at <a href="tel:[phone]">12345678</a> 

Please note that "+47" (international code) is NOT displayed visually, it is included only in the hyperlink. But now it turns out that a limited number of people (about one day a day) are actually called the private local number 47123456 . Not many people consider the size of our business, but still a big nuisance for the family receiving these calls.

People calling say they just clicked the dial link.

Anyone else had problems? Does anyone know about mobile phones that do not support tel hypertext? Any suggestions for a solution? (Besides changing our or their phone number, of course.)

Answer 1

There are various ways that smartphones choose a phone number. some read the text of your site - some use the tag

from my first attempt: I would add +47 to the displayed phone number on my second attempt (or both together): I would replace +47 with 0047 (is it norway - or?)

and before publishing, I had a third idea: in which encoding is the web server, and which encoding has the html / PHP page in the source code? And UTF-8, or something else? Perhaps your server sends it in a different way than the created website, and somehow some smartphones cannot handle it correctly.

Answer 2

The problem here is quite simple: this is URL coding.

+ char is a reserved character in the url and represents a space.

To get the actual character + replace it with the encoded version of the URL:% 2B

See the links for more details:

Wikipedia

W3scools