Sonos says sorry for
app fiasco

It’s hard to come back from a corporate disaster that media hails as a case study for business schools to pore over for years to come.

That is what Sonos is desperately trying to do now, as it announces seven new commitments resulting from an internal review of an app release in May that has all but destroyed the company. 

“These commitments will ensure Sonos continues to deliver the best wireless audio system in the world and its customers always enjoy the quality for which Sonos is known,” it said in a statement last week.

It didn’t feel that way for many users back in May, when Sonos added the Ace headphones to its product portfolio. It updated the app through which Sonos devices are controlled – already with painful usability challenges – and reduced its usability. It removed or broke functions like Playlist and Queue edit modes, Music Library browsing, and Alarm. Volume responsiveness became inconsistent, and the app itself became unstable.

The public relations fallout has resulted in missed revenue forecasts and a layoff of more than100 staff, aside from delays of subsequent product releases.

Now, says Sonos, 80% of missing features have been restored.

“Our priority since its release has been – and continues to be – fixing the app,” said Sonos CEO Patrick Spence last week. “There were missteps, and we first went deep to understand how we got here, and then moved to convert those learnings into action.

“We are committed to making changes to get us back to being the brand people love by offering the best audio system for the home and beyond. We must always do right by our customers, and I am confident that, with these commitments, we will.”

A statement last week included the following commitments:

• Unwavering focus on the customer experience. To ensure that we deliver the highest level of customer experience, we will always establish ambitious quality benchmarks at the outset of product development and will not launch products before meeting these criteria. We will also enhance the tools necessary to measure the quality of the experience actually being delivered to customers to ensure that we maintain the standards our customers expect.
• Increase the stringency of our pre-launch testing phases. Our beta testing program will include more types of customers and more diverse setups for a longer testing period. This will allow us to find, diagnose and solve customer concerns more quickly before going to market.
• Demonstrate humility when introducing changes. In contrast to the all-at-once automated app release we issued in May, any major change to the Sonos app will be released gradually, allowing customers to adjust and provide feedback before it becomes the default. For new features smaller in scope, we will introduce an opt-in experimental features option in the app for customers who would like to participate in testing them.
• Appoint a Quality Ombudsperson. This new role will ensure our employees have a clear path to escalate any concerns in terms of quality and customer experience. This person will be consulted by executive leadership throughout the development process and before any product launches. In this role, the ombudsperson will guarantee transparency and publish a report to management and employees twice per year and will present regularly to the Sonos board of directors.

In addition, we are also committing to the following to begin to regain the trust of our customers:

• Extend our home speaker warranties. To reflect our strong belief in the quality of our products, we will extend the manufacturer’s warranty by one year for all home theater and plug-in speaker products currently under warranty.
• Relentlessly improve the app experience with regular software upgrades. We will roll out updated mobile software versions every 2-4 weeks to optimize and enhance the software experience, even once this issue is resolved.
• Establish a Customer Advisory Board. To ensure we never lose sight of the voice of the customer, this board will provide feedback and insights from a customer perspective to help shape and improve our software and products before they are launched.

Many of these initiatives are already underway and others will be implemented through the remainder of the year. To demonstrate the significance of these commitments to the company, no member of the Executive Leadership Team will accept any annual bonus payout for the October 2024 – September 2025 fiscal year unless the company succeeds in improving the quality of the app experience and rebuilding customer trust.

Update on the Sonos app

Since the launch of the new app in May, the Sonos team has been working diligently to release new software updates approximately every two weeks, and rapidly roll out new features and meaningful improvements and fixes. More than 80% of the app’s missing features have been reintroduced and the company expects to have almost 100% restored in the coming weeks. The reliability and speed of the app has improved with each release.

“We’ve made good progress on addressing many of the software issues, and these new commitments will drive us to emerge from this period with an even stronger commitment to quality,” Spence said.

For more information, visit sonos.com, and follow along on @sonos.