Hi,
As I said, you need to check the data in the POST.
$element contains the data that will be saved in the Joomla user table and thus doesn't contain the telephone of the user which is a HikaShop field.
So you need to look into $_POST (do a var_dump in the plugin) in order to get the exact variable name you can use to access the value entered by the customer.
Then, you can do your MySQL query for the check.
Also, the way you wrote your query, it is vulnerable to MySQL injections attacks. It should be written like that for security reasons:
$query = "SELECT `user_telephone` FROM `#__hikashop_user` WHERE `user_telephone` = " . $db->Quote($element->user_telephone);