PhoneNumber not being fullfiled on contact

Hi everyone,

We are experiencing inconsistent behavior with contacts created through our WhatsApp channel and wanted to check if anyone else has seen something similar.

When users start a conversation via WhatsApp, some contacts are created with the phone field populated, while others are created without the phone number.

However, in the Intercom UI we consistently see the "WhatsApp number" field populated, even when the phone field is null in the Contact API response.

Because of this, we are unable to retrieve the user's phone number via the API.

Example Contact API response

{
  "type": "contact",
  "id": "69b8334c390fea79a974100c",
  "external_id": "whatsapp:xpto",
  "phone": null,
  "name": "Teste"
}

Conversation payload

{
  "type": "conversation",
  "source": {
    "type": "whatsapp",
    "author": {
      "type": "lead",
      "id": "69b8334c390fea79a974xxxc",
      "name": "Teste"
    }
  }
}

In the Intercom UI the WhatsApp number is visible, but it does not seem to be exposed through either the Contact API or Conversation API.

Has anyone experienced this before?

Specifically, we are trying to understand:

• Is the WhatsApp number stored in a field that is not exposed in the public API?

• Is there a configuration required for WhatsApp numbers to populate the phone field?

• Is there any endpoint that allows retrieving the WhatsApp number associated with the contact?

We rely on the phone number to identify users in our backend systems, so having access to it via API is critical for our integration.

Thanks in advance!