The problem
When US Google Ads campaigns were pointed at a website form on 14 August 2026, the CRM began prepending the sub-account's default country, the UK (+44), to numbers submitted without a country code.
Nothing errored. The leads arrived, but with the wrong country code on the number.
What we built
- Root cause: the form had country auto-detection switched off and no US entry in its priority list. On 21 September 2026 we set it to auto-detect with the US first, after saving a backup of the form.
- A backfill that reads the original numbers from the website's form-submissions API and writes the corrected number back to each CRM contact.
- A note and a tag on every corrected contact, so the change is visible to the sales team.
Result
- 33 affected contacts, with mangling starting on 14 August 2026.
- 30 of 33 corrected (28 US, 2 CA).
- 3 were rejected by the CRM as duplicates of contacts that already held the correct number. One of them had already converted through another channel.
Scope and limits
- We say "30 of 33 numbers corrected", not "30 leads recovered". We have no evidence that any of the 30 was subsequently reached or converted.
- A page cache may still serve the old form to some visitors. That caveat was logged at the time.
- A small fix at small scale. We include it because the root cause is generic: a CRM's country fallback can corrupt data without raising an error.