Setting up Contacts for international calling

I am a relatively new iPhone user. I want to set up my international contacts in Contacts to be able to call them by selecting the contact whether I am in the US or in the local country. Calling the United Kingdom, for example, I would expect to dial the international dialing code (011), then country code (44), then the UK number omitting the leading zero. Calling the number while in the UK I would just call the UK number, but this time included the leading zero.

When I set up the contact in Outlook, I enter the country field (United Kingdom), the area code field (0xxxx), and the local number field (xxxxxx). This displays in Outlook as follows:

+44 (0xxxx) (xxxxxx)

When I sync with the iPhone the number displays as follows:

+44 (0) xxxx xxxxxx

which made me very hopeful that the iPhone understood the logic and would dial correctly whether I was in the USA or in the UK. However, it does not. It will not dial the UK number from the US. I had lengthy conversations with ATT and Apple, finally reaching a senior adviser. The senior adviser was not familiar with the problem and did not have a solution.

When I edited the contact to take out the 0 in parenthesis, ie changed it to

+44 xxxx xxxxxx

it did work when calling from the UK from the US. But when I asked a friend to try that format on his iPhone in the UK, it did not dial correctly.

So, right now it seems as if I have to set up 2 contacts, one to dial the contact from a foreign country, and one to dial the contact in the local country. This does not make sense to me, surely Apple have figured this out already. I can't be the only person with this problem or need.

Anyone else have any experience on this?