I altered the data the workflow started with so that the first and second row it processes has data in the “cell phone” cell. worked without an issue.
currently i am using generate table to create a table off of a data sample and the cell phone column is a “decimal” type. looking online i am not finding any real way to get around this error except for one guy who simply changed his column formatting. so i am going to try that. empty cells are necessary and a requirement to work.