What Trees do we Plant for the Next 10,000 OSS/BSS Practitioners?
The old proverb above really resonates. I love this industry. You could even say I’m Passionate About OSS. And like many of us, I’ve been
Phone books now look like a relic from another era.
Stone. Cold. Dead.
But they were once one of the most powerful business growth engines in the world. Owned by telcos!
As they declined in importance, Telcos didn’t just lose a directory. They totally forgot they were matchmakers.
Phone books were never just paper directories.
They placed telcos at the heart of business discovery, trusted connections, supply chain partnerships and customer acquisition.
And AI might be unwittingly opening that door of opportunity once more.
The real playbook behind the phone book still exists today.
The old phone books, especially the Yellow Pages, were not simply lists of numbers. They were commercial infrastructure that played an integral part in connecting Buyers with Sellers.
For a telco’s business customers / subscribers, they solved a very real problem: How do I get found by people who need what I sell?
If you forgot to place your business’s listing in the Yellow Pages…. well, I’ll let you watch the 20 year old, iconic advertisement below to get a sense of what happened next!
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For buyers, phone books solved the flip-side of that problem: How do I find a credible supplier when I have a specific (and possibly even obscure) need?
That made them far more valuable than their paper format suggested (not to mention the value of the forests of trees that were destroyed in the process).
I’m probably forgetting other important models here, but I’m imagining that they were the original form of pull marketing – buyers actively did their own research for plumbers, accountants, electricians, couriers, caterers and thousands of other services.
They also supported push marketing, because businesses could identify prospects, gaps in supply chains, adjacent suppliers and potential partners.
This was still largely the era of cold calling as the predominant form of customer acquisition.
Telcos benefited because they sat at the very centre of this business discovery engine.
As Daniel Priestley suggests:
Everything is downstream of lead generation.
Telco services formed the banks of that stream.
But even in the golden ages of telco, connectivity was only ever the means to an end. It was an amplifier of commercial, consumer and social needs.
The phone line connected the call. The White Pages and Yellow Pages helped create the reason for the call, or at very minimum, facilitated the call.
Telcos might have never really grasped this point. They were not just selling access. They were helping businesses grow.
Clearly, the internet made phone books obsolete years ago.
Search was faster, richer and more convenient. Business discovery moved from printed directories to search engines, online marketplaces, review platforms and social media.
But the underlying need never disappeared. Businesses still needed customers. Buyers still needed trusted suppliers. Supply chains still needed new partnerships. Global, local and regional markets still needed ways to find and contact one another.
What totally changed was who captured the value.
Search engines became the new discovery layer. Social platforms became the new attention layer. Online marketplaces became the new transaction layer.
Telcos, meanwhile, increasingly retreated into the role of connectivity provider, assuming that this is what their customers wanted all along. They sold off the phone book divisions of their business and went back to connectivity.
They still served the businesses. They still billed them. They still maintained relationships with them. They still knew where they were, how to contact them and often what services they consumed.
But the outward-facing matchmaking role, and the value accumulated with it, moved elsewhere.
Instead of looking outwards (ie how to serve the customer), they increasingly looked inwards (ie how to create telco services that pulled revenue from customers).
The industry didn’t just lose a cumbersome printed product. It was never about that. It lost a strategic position in the business growth ecosystem.
Does this feel like one of the great missed opportunities in telco history to you?
For the last two decades, most businesses have built their customer acquisition strategies around internet search. Be discoverable. Rank well. Optimise content (Search Engine Optimisation – SEO). Capture intent. Convert traffic.
That model is now under pressure.
AI is changing how people find answers. Buyers can increasingly research markets, compare suppliers, summarise options and develop shortlists without ever visiting a supplier website or speaking to a salesperson. The journey is becoming more informed, more automated and less visible.
The two strongest customer acquisition models of these past two phases (cold-calling and SEO) are now diminishing in value.
That is a huge problem for sellers.
If people are using search engines less, then SEO is no longer the dependable acquisition engine it once was.
With supplier information now abundant and accessible, cold outreach is increasingly blocked, ignored, distrusted and summarily dismissed (for the large part).
Social media, once celebrated as viral marketing at scale, often feels more feral than viral these days. Feeds are crowded. Trust is thin. Algorithms are unpredictable. Audiences are tired.
Yet companies cannot simply wait and hope to be discovered through AI citations, residual search traffic, word-of-mouth or luck.
They still need active customer acquisition methods.
This is where the old phone book lesson becomes relevant again. Businesses don’t only need information. They need trusted pathways to demand. They need mechanisms that help them find customers, partners and suppliers in ways that feel credible, timely, useful and perhaps most importantly, trustworthy.
AI may reduce the dominance of traditional search, but it also creates the need for new trusted discovery systems.
IMHO, that leaves the door of opportunity ajar. The opening telcos should be studying.
Telcos have assets that many digital platforms would love to possess.
They have existing business subscriber relationships. They have an audience desperately looking for new ways to acquire customers.
They have billing arrangements. They have verified contact details. They have KYC (Know your Customer) processes and information. They have regional reach. They have distribution channels. They have service histories, product catalogues, partner ecosystems and, in many cases, local market presence.
Most importantly, they already serve both sides of many potential matches.
But, if they only continue to look inward, they’ll never see this untapped opportunity.
A telco may serve the construction firm, the electrical contractor, the logistics company, the managed IT provider, the security installer, the retailer and the local manufacturer. It may not currently connect those businesses commercially, but one side of the relationship graph already exists.
This is where OSS and BSS become strategically important too.
The next generation of business discovery will not be powered by a static directory. It will require identity, consent, catalogue, eligibility, charging, settlement, partner management, fulfilment and assurance. Those are familiar telco capabilities.
A trusted Business Operations System (BOS), with an in-built matchmaking platform would need to know who businesses are, what they offer, where they operate, whether they consent to introductions, how leads are qualified, how outcomes are tracked and how value is monetised.
For the telcos to really add value, this is not just a marketing problem. It’s an operating model problem.
And telcos already have many of the operational foundations.
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The next phone book will not be a big slab of paper. Obviously. It won’t even look like a traditional Internet search box.
However, it could look like:
The value will not come from listing every business. Not directly anyway. That problem has already been solved many times over.
The value will come from reliable, trusted matching:
This is a very different proposition from the old Yellow Pages, but it carries threads of the same strategic DNA.
Phone books mattered because they placed telcos at the centre of business discovery (and the value created by that).
That opportunity is becoming relevant again.
The old format died. The need didn’t.
And if telcos want to move beyond being connectivity utilities, they may need to remember the lesson they forgot:
The greatest value was never in the phone book itself.
It was in being the trusted matchmaker. It could still be.
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