The LACRM Zapier integration “Find Contact” doesn’t allow searching by phone number. I’ve explored the “API Request” call but my actual coding skills are rusty and I didn’t get it to work, so now I’ve built a shadow lookup table in Zapier Tables but that slowly gets out of date as LACRM data changes. Has anyone found a better workaround?
Background: For automated processes (external automations, not LACRM automations), I need to be able to uniquely identify a client. Searching by name is too imprecise (John Smith, Jon Smith, Johnathan Smith, John Q. Smith, J Smith, Smith,John…) and too many potential false hits. I use email as the primary search, but sometimes clients don’t have or refuse to share email, and sometimes the triggering event only has a phone number (incoming SMS message or fax, for example).
I don’t know of a better workaround than what you described. The Zapier Table will get out of date over time like you said, but that gives you a reference for phone numbers so you can search. You could potentially use the API, but that does require programming so it can get tricky quickly. Sorry I don’t have more ideas for you here!
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I’m guessing the dev team monitors the forums, but you might also send your request to support. I’ve had issues where LACRM/Zapier behavior wasn’t behaving as intended and they fixed it right away. I think you have a good use case for adding new functionality to the Zapier find customer action.
I think the support team is well aware of me. 
Seriously, the entire LACRM team is fantastic and I really appreciate their quick and thoughtful answers.
As a reformed software developer myself, I understand that feature requests always exceed time available, it’s impossible to make 100% of users 100% happy 100% of the time, and there’s no such thing as a “simple matter of programming.”
My question here was see if perhaps there were other approaches that people had tried. It doesn‘t seem to be hot topic, so I can understand why the developers haven’t pushed this to the top of the wish list. I hope to revisit using the Zapier API request call as soon as I have some free time, with Gemini helping with the coding.
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