Sonos' Plans to Overcome Its App Crisis Include a Quality Overseer

Sonos’ Plans to Overcome Its App Crisis Include a Quality Overseer

Sonos is creating a new Quality Ombudsman role to ensure employees can raise concerns they have surrounding the customer experience and quality of its products and services.

In a blog post, Sonos stated that the Quality Ombudsman will report to executive leadership, present regularly to the company’s board of directors, and publish twice-annual reports.

It also outlined its plans to form a Customer Advisory Board which will look at things from a customer’s perspective. The board will provide insights and feedback to help influence and improve future software and products prior to launch.

Other steps Sonos says it will take as part of its plans to rebuild customer trust include:

Focusing on customer experience: Sonos promises it will introduce “ambitious quality benchmarks” for product development and will not launch products until those criteria are met. It also says it will “enhance” tools it uses to maintain and measure the standards customers expect.
More stringent pre-launch testing: This will apparently include a “broader range” of customer and “more diverse setups” for beta testing so that issues can be identified and fixed more rapidly before launch.
Making more gradual changes: Any major changes to the Sonos app will be released gradually so customers can provide feedback and adjust. The company also plans to allow customers to opt in to testing new features.
Extending home speaker warranties: Home theater and plug-in speaker products still under warranty will get an extra year of warranty added.
Continuous app improvements: Sonos will roll out mobile software versions once or twice monthly to resolve current issues. Once these issues are fixed, new versions will optimize and enhance the app.

The announcement of these plans for change come after the Sonos app’s hugely ambitious overhaul rollout in May. In the days and weeks after release, Sonos was inundated with customer complaints across social media and its community message board.

Users mentioned a huge range of issues including being unable to turn music off, experiencing issues adjusting volume, saved radio stations vanishing, and Spotify libraries not showing.

Many users expressed frustration that the newly designed app was missing key features that had been available for years.

Five months later, complaints are still flooding X. Users complain the app is unable to find local libraries, with one customer posting a video showing the “completely broken” app’s failed troubleshooting process.

This is hopeless. What is it, four months since the upgrade of death and every time I try to use it, first it can't find my local library and after I've reloaded it, then it can't play anything properly. This was never a problem until May. I haven't used Sonos in four months now!

— Poppies From A Tray (@FromTray) October 1, 2024

If you’re considering buying @Sonos this pretty much sums up the user experience.

You try following a guide but nothing works.

The solution is almost always a full reset or reinstall the app.

It’s completely broken. pic.twitter.com/SvnCNhXlEJ

— Martin LeBlanc (@martinleblanc) September 14, 2024

Sonos further angered users by failing to respond appropriately to customer feedback and concerns, instead saying that the launch of the updated app took “courage.”

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence issued an apology in a blog post 11 weeks after the launch, admitting that too many users had experienced significant issues with the new app.

Spence also explained that fixing issues identified since launch had delayed plans to add missing functionality and features.

He apologized for disappointing users and reassured customers that fixing the app remained the company’s top priority, saying “We know we have work to do to earn back your trust and are working hard to do just that.”

Some Reddit users responded to the company’s plans for improvement, calling it a “wildly tone deaf response,” while others suggested it should “roll back the app until it’s actually an improvement.”