If You Can't See It, You Don't Own It
For years, AV was something you installed and forgot. The real value was never the hardware on the wall - it's the software layer that watches it, updates it, and keeps it running.
Insights
Notes from the environment customers notice.
Industry POV, behavioural research, and explanatory writing from the people building the audio, signage, phone, and music systems.
More insights
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Opinion Break the Trend of Customer Experience Dissatisfaction
Customer Experience scores have declined for a fourth consecutive year, with 2025 showing the lowest satisfaction scores. But 2026 doesn't have to follow suit.
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Opinion Music subconsciously influences purchase decisions — and customers don't know it's happening
A 1999 study found that background music changed which wine customers bought — yet only 1 in 44 mentioned the music when asked. What that means for businesses that design (or neglect) their audio environment.
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Opinion Why we built CubeGroup
The audio-visual-telephony layer is the topline opportunity hiding in plain sight. Here's how a group of four companies came to be built around that one decision.
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Opinion Beyond Background Music
Speech privacy is a behavioural lever, not just an acoustic one. Sound masking layered beneath music can cut speech intelligibility distance by 60-75%, helping customers feel safe to speak — and stay.
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Opinion Is Your Support Strategy Secretly Sabotaging Customer Loyalty?
When companies engineer friction into support — long holds, complex forms, dead-end self-service — customers stop assuming good intent and start assuming they don't matter. Here's how to design support that feels like help.
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Opinion Win the Moment, Win the Return
If your AV system can't adapt to customer intent, you're forcing every experience into a generic mould — and paying for it in lost loyalty. Software-defined AV lets you shape each moment so customers feel successful.
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Opinion Are you building walls or bridges for customers?
How asking one simple question — "is this good for our customer?" — can turn your customer experience from obstacle to opportunity. Most businesses ask the wrong question by default.
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Opinion Engineer for Behaviour or Brace for Reputation Impact
Mistakes happen in any organization. Complaints are inevitable. The real test is whether your systems make resolution simple or painful — because if your easiest channel is social media, that's where customers will end up.
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Opinion Where the Senses Go, Decisions Follow
Perceptual fluency is the ease with which the brain processes sensory input. When something is easy to process, we judge it more positively — more familiar, more attractive, more trustworthy. Sound is the shortcut.
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Research Stop Leaving Sales on the Floor
In-store audio exists to influence human behaviour. Once you accept that, the audio system itself has to be software-defined — because behaviour changes by context, and your audio must change just as easily.
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Opinion The Doorman Fallacy: What Hotels Can Teach Us About Losing the Human Touch
Hotels learned the hard way that removing the doorman didn't save money — it eroded the two moments customers remember most. Now AI is helping businesses commit the same fallacy at scale.
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Opinion The Cognitive Bottleneck Marketers Can't Afford to Ignore
Working memory is the bottleneck almost no marketer designs for. Open loops — asking customers to hold information before they know why it matters — quietly erode trust, increase frustration, and undermine your campaigns.
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Opinion Are You Turning Customers Away Without Knowing It?
Every business has invisible "mops" — small signals that quietly tell customers they're no longer welcome. Bad hold audio, fading music, abrupt chatbots. By the time you notice fewer customers, they've already noticed you're closing.
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Methodology When the Cloud Fails, Don't Let Your Business Go Dark
Hyperscaler outages keep proving the same point: building on a single cloud is a liability. CUBE deploys workloads across multiple clouds, our own bare metal, or on client premises — and devices designed to keep working when connectivity drops.
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Opinion Overinvest in Your Toilets
Every business has a version of the bathroom — a space customers rarely see as core, but where true standards show through. The phone greeting. The on-hold tone. The AI voice. They are all signals.
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Methodology System Sovereignty in a Software-Defined World: Who really owns your technology?
Smart fridges showing ads. AI services training on your data. Cloud platforms studying your usage. The real question isn't what your technology does — it's who actually owns it.
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Methodology Shai Hulud: The Hidden Risks of Supply Chain Attacks in a Software-Defined World
Modern software depends on hundreds of shared libraries, any of which can be poisoned. The recent self-propagating Shai-Hulud attack shows how a single compromised dependency can spread worm-like through the ecosystem.
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Research CUBE FileLink: A Game-Changer for MOH Agencies
How an international Message On Hold agency collapsed months of repetitive production work into a single automated workflow. "The biggest time savings effort that we've done."
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Methodology Harnessing Generative AI for Customer Service: Bridging the Gap Between Enthusiasm and Expertise
Business leaders are racing to deploy generative AI; the engineers building those systems are warning to slow down. Closing that gap is the real challenge — and the foundation for AI that actually works.
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Methodology Windows 11's Upgrade Block: A Lesson in Tech Deprecation
TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, and CPU cutoffs are about to make up to 500 million PCs ineligible for Windows 11. A short history of deprecation — and what businesses should be doing now before Windows 10 support ends.
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Research Solution Stories: Custom Audio Scheduler App
How CUBE's modular architecture made it possible to deliver a precise, hour-by-hour audio scheduling system for a client whose priority messaging needs went beyond what any off-the-shelf product could handle.
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Research Solution Stories: Live Announcements App
A beach-town trolley needed pre-programmed music to fade out the moment the driver started speaking, then resume cleanly afterward. Here is how CUBE's modular architecture solved it with a small add-on app.
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Research Solution Story: Customer Engagement Solution (CUBEngage)
How a Good Feet franchise digitized its in-store consultation process — capturing prospect data, keeping waiting customers engaged with personalized video, and improving sales conversion across multiple locations.
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Research How Serving Customers is Easier with CUBE's Technology, Custom Tools, and Software
If a restaurant has chicken, lettuce, and buttermilk ranch on the menu, you should still be able to order a chicken salad. The same logic applies to CUBE: the ingredients are there, even if the dish isn't on the menu yet.
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Research What Can Smart Hold Do?
Smart Hold turns the on-hold queue from a place callers tolerate into a place they engage. Genre selection, quizzes, surveys, intelligent greetings, multilingual messages, SMS handoffs — and live caller analytics behind it all.
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Research The Back-End: How to make my 'On Hold' sound smart using CUBE.fusion
How CUBE.fusion lets you build a smart on-hold experience from the back end — drag-and-drop audio, scheduling, message ordering, and caller behaviour reports — without elevator music or restart-from-zero loops.
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Research The Heart and Brains Behind Smart Hold
Smart Hold is a way to show your callers you care about their time. Time-zone aware greetings, genre selection, language choice, surveys, database lookups, and a journey that doesn't restart every time someone picks up.
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Research New CUBE Scheduling Feature – Expire Actions
A new Expire Action column in the CUBE file section lets you tell the system what to do at the end of a file's Valid To date — keep, delete, or roll over to next year. Cleaner folders, less manual maintenance.
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Research Moving into the future with better on-hold options for clients, providers and businesses.
On-hold today is either silence or generic 1970s loops. The next leap is control, interactivity, and dynamic targeted content — and the tech to do it has been here for years.
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Research 3 Limits to Traditional Broadworks MOH & How to Fix Them
Repeated messages that start over every transfer, low-fidelity codec-mangled audio, and zero caller choice — the three structural limits of legacy Broadworks MOH, and how CUBE.fusion solves each one.
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Research The Importance of Good On Hold Music
Hold music is the caller's first impression of your business. It changes how time feels, brands your service before a human even speaks, and matters more — not less — as caller standards have risen.
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Creating Meaningful Customer Relationships in the Age of Tech (Infographic)
Chatbots, AI, and automation are reshaping customer communication — but the businesses that win are the ones that strike the right balance between automated reach and human authenticity.
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Methodology Are we creating a Secure Enterprise Internet of Things (EIoT)-Infographic
72% of retailers are running EIoT projects — but security gaps still plague the space. A short infographic explaining the current state of EIoT in retail and where CUBE fits as a technology partner.
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Methodology Meltdown and Spectre Hardware Vulnerabilities? CUBE responds!
Meltdown and Spectre exposed almost every modern processor — Intel, AMD, ARM — to a fundamental design flaw. CUBE hardware is unaffected because we do not use the affected chips or operating systems.
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Opinion How to Engage Millennials for Customer Insight and Marketing
Millennials were on track to drive 30% of retail sales by 2020. Traditional marketing fails to reach them — and the businesses that adapt their approach are the ones that capture the share.
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Opinion The reality of being a retailer in 2017 — Infographic
Smartphones and Wi-Fi have collapsed the line between online and offline retail. The retailers that thrive are the ones who embrace that reality rather than fear it.
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Opinion Good Customer Service — Infographic
No matter how innovative the business, the fundamentals of customer service still decide whether customers stay or leave. A short infographic on the basics — and how to bring an organization into alignment around them.
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Client Support: An Opportunity for Customer Engagement
Three rules learned in a premium support role: don't punish customers for their own mistakes, attitude outranks knowledge, and doing more than you have to is what creates loyalty. Illustrated by a $4 part that bought a lifelong customer.
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Research How Our Customer Engagement Strategy Works
CUBE SiteMC lets store managers adjust music, signage, and brand campaigns on the fly from any smartphone, tablet, or browser — no app install required. Local fine-tuning that goes far beyond traditional day-parting.
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Methodology CUBE is all about UPTIME for your business
99.9% cloud uptime still allows 8.75 hours of downtime per year — and any streaming music service will sit below that. Why CUBE's store-and-forward architecture and diagnostic depth deliver music uptime nothing else can match.
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Methodology Why a CUBE Music Player for In-Store Music?
Streaming-only in-store music quietly shifts hidden costs and operational risk onto the business. A physical CUBE player with store-and-forward avoids the brittleness streaming introduces — without raising sticker price.
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DDOS Attack Stops the Music for Others – CUBE Responds
The Dyn DDOS attack took out Spotify, Pandora, and dozens of other streaming services for hours. CUBE clients heard no silence — because CUBE hardware is designed to keep playing even when it cannot reach the cloud.
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Achieving Good Customer Service
Customer service starts long before someone walks into a store. The mission, accessibility, training, and follow-through that make excellence stick — plus the IoT shifts changing what "good" looks like in the digital age.
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Opinion Digital Trends SMBs Need to Focus On
A summary of the digital trends shaping how small and medium businesses connect with customers — and concrete examples of how the largest companies are already putting them to work.
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Research Shopper Marketing Trends and Strategy
Once a customer steps into your store you have a limited window to influence the purchase. A practical guide to shopper marketing — music, signage, message-on-hold, social, analytics — and why the integrated plan outperforms the silo.
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CUBE releases the industry's most powerful and easy to use music blending and separation tools.
CUBE's new Music Blending and Separation Tools let audio professionals blend any number of playlists with automated artist and title separation — consistent music experiences across any music supplier.
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Research The Power of Location Based Advertising & In-Store Music
Location-based advertising and in-store music both quietly shape buying behaviour. 91% of brand executives planned to grow location-ad spend; 76% of shoppers feel more relaxed in stores that play music. Combined, they compound.
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Digital Trends: Understanding and Targeting the 'Always-On' Consumer
Consumers are connected 24/7 and willing to trade data — but only in exchange for genuine value. The five key demands of the always-on consumer, and what they mean for brands trying to break through.
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Methodology Connecting a CUBE when Audio & LAN Connections Are Far Apart
Sometimes the CUBE has to deliver audio at a point physically distant from the nearest network drop. Wiring strategies — powerline ethernet, wireless bridges, and pulled phone pairs — for installers.
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Methodology Quality of On Hold Marketing in a VoIP Environment
Why VoIP voice codecs mangle hold music — and what MOH producers can do about it. A deep technical walkthrough of G.711, G.729, voice-shaped audio, codec negotiation, and where the long-term fix actually lives.
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The Coming Inflection Point, Part 4: On-Hold and In-Store Business Gaps
Businesses and retailers want a consistent customer experience across every channel — on-hold, in-store, web, mobile, signage. Today's siloed messaging mostly delivers noise. Here is the gap, and where the metrics need to go.
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Opinion The Coming Inflection Point, Part 3: What Joe Consumer Wants
Consumers want to be valued, surprised, recognized, and helped to improve. The data is consistent across studies. For audio and engagement providers, the implication is clear: you are no longer a message mechanic, you are a producer of two-way experiences.
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Methodology Raspberry: Pi in the Sky?
CUBE OS can run on a Raspberry Pi — but should it? A clear-eyed look at the technical and regulatory tradeoffs (networking shortcuts, power sensitivity, FCC/CE certification) that make the Pi unsuited to professional 24/7 deployments.
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Coming Inflection Point: Part 2
Like the computing industry of the 80s, on-hold and in-store music suppliers are vertical silos with proprietary end-to-end stacks. That structure does not survive industry inflection. Here is what comes next.
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CUBEOS is truly future proof with unsurpassed connectivity and hardware portability
Why building a serious remote-managed audio platform on Android — or on a casually-assembled Linux distro — sets service providers up to fail. CUBEOS exists because B2B remote management is a different engineering problem to B2C.
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Methodology About CUBEOS and the CUBE name
The CUBE player hardware is not literally cube-shaped. The name describes the three integrated dimensions of the platform — the playback device, the CUBEOS / Apps that run on it, and the CubeMC backend that manages them all.
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The Coming Inflection Point: Part 1
An inflection point is the moment an industry's familiar map stops matching the territory. Andy Grove called it the leader's first real "are we sure we know where we're going?" moment. The on-hold and in-store industry is on its way to one.
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Change is Afoot in the On-Hold and In-Store Industry...
More and more on-hold and in-store providers are saying "something's changed." A short opener to a keynote-driven series on the inflection point reshaping the industry — and how providers can flourish on the other side of it.
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Methodology The Future of on Hold and Music Delivery Has Already Arrived
Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky once said: "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." CUBE is the future-proof delivery platform for providers and music suppliers serving on-hold and in-store customer experiences.
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Opinion Are you Short-Changing your Audio Marketing / Point-of-Contact Business?
Three critical questions to ask of any audio marketing equipment you buy: is it condemned to stay as you bought it, can you really just drop it in, and is it saving time or wasting it? A guide for providers making informed choices.
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Research Experience the sexiest and most powerful management interface, ever
Try out CUBE's virtual demo platform live with your own content. Manage CUBE from anywhere with nothing more than a browser — IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad and mobile.
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Do You Enjoy Aggravating Your Customers?
Five small mistakes that quietly drive customers away — "please hold" greetings, music they hate, inconsistent messaging across channels, time-wasting platitudes, and aggressive cross-sell at the worst possible moment.
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