The updated and ill-fated Sonos app update.
After its summer iPhone app update fiasco, and a series of mostly-broken promises to fix it, Sonos is again trying to win back shaken customer confidence.
Sonos hasn’t had the best 2024, because of its ham-fisted approach to overhauling its app. After multiple apologies, the smart speaker maker is making a bigger statement, this time trying to convince users that it will move forward with its customers in mind.
The whole affair started in April with the announcement of its overhauled iOS controller app arriving on May 7. The app redesign aimed to streamline the experience of accessing content, paring down the home screen and removing tabs in favor of a single page approach.
Since then, Sonos has been trying to apologize to wronged consumers, culminating in a new page on its website and a YouTube video.
The page, titled “Recommitting to Quality and Customer Experience,” is a lengthy admittance that it failed customers. Followed by a lot of insisting that it will get things right next time, and in the future too.
“We fell short when our new app release didn’t meet the standards we promised,” the page starts. It then claims Sonos has “spent time listening to our customers and employees, learning from our mistakes, and taking action.”
The page goes on to outline “new commitments to show our renewed focus on software quality, customer experience, and delivering the excellence you deserve from Sonos.”
That opening statement is then accompanied by a three-minute video of CEO Patrick Spence talking directly to the camera about the commitments. For an apology video, it has all the gravitas that the start of a redemption tour written in Notes with a screencap posted to X has.
The (new) Commitments
Sonos outlines seven new commitments and initiatives that it hopes will earn back customer trust. For some, they will hopefully avoid Sonos embarking on changes that created the PR mess in the first place.
The top is an “Unwavering Focus on Customer Experience,” in that it will not launch products until they meet quality benchmarks established at the start of product development.
This is followed by “Increasing the Stringency of Pre-Launch Testing,” which will include “a broader range of customers and more diverse setups.”
The third, “Approaching Change with Humility” sounds a bit hand-wavy, but really it’s Sonos saying it will be making major changes more gradually. This will mean it has more chance to get customer feedback before the changes become the default.
This is pertinent, as amid the app unrest, Spence did admit that the app couldn’t be rolled back to a previous and more usable state. Sonos had apparently gone too far in adjusting various software elements that it couldn’t reverse course.
Sonos customers with in-warranty hardware get an extra year as an apology.
The fourth commitment, “Appointing a Quality Ombudsperson,” sounds important but could easily not be that useful. A new role of Quality Ombudsperson will be made, who will “ensure employees have a clear path to raise concerns regarding quality and customer experience.”
That person will report directly to executive leadership, publish reports twice a year, and “present regularly to the Sonos board of directors.” Of course, whether the board and leadership will actually listen to complaints is a different matter.
The remaining commitments are to help regain consumer trust. The first and easiest being the extension of the manufacturer’s warranty for any existing under-warranty home theater and speaker products by one year.
For the app, Sonos promises “Relentless App Improvement,” with updates to the app every two to four weeks. It plans to do this “even after the current issues are fully resolved.”
It will also be establishing a Customer Advisory Board, which will “provide feedback and insights from a customer perspective.” Again, this will only work if leadership actually listens to complaints.
No bonuses, kind of…
So that the management at Sonos can really learn from their mistakes, there’s a financial element too. The page adds that the Sonos Executive Leadership Team “will not accept any annual bonus payout for the October 2024-September 2025 fiscal year.”
This isn’t an entire bonus blackout, as there’s a massive caveat. They’ll still get bonuses if “the company succeeds in improving the quality of the app experience and rebuilding customer trust.”
Indeed, Sonos boasts that “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.”
Considering Sonos is signing up to issue app updates and fixes every few weeks, and is effectively bribing customers with a warranty extension, those bonuses won’t be gone for long. Especially since it can define the line it must reach for the payouts.
As the latest in the continuing Sonos apology tour, the measures are what you would expect a large company to offer to consumers. It’s beyond a simple apology and is a very sizable declaration that it will do better in the future.
However, it has taken over four months to reach this point. You’d normally expect this sort of offering to be issued from a company within weeks of the discovery of wrongdoing, if not days.
We’ve had months of waiting for Sonos to fix the app, and it’s still not done. Even Sonos admits that.
Even the promise that higher-ups won’t get bonuses has a lot of wiggle room. It seems to be a punishment, but one that could easily be circumvented so that the top people still get their money.
It’s the biggest apology from Sonos so far, but it remains to be seen whether the promises are earnest or just for show. Right now, we’re betting on the latter.
