Sonos' road to redemption: under-fire firm details 7-point plan to win back fans

Sonos vows to learn from its recent woes

Sonos' botched app update is one of the biggest tech boo-boos of the year – when it launched, the new version was riddled with bugs and deleted many fan favourite features like timers and the ability to make a playlist. Now Sonos is determined to learn from its mistakes, and has set out a seven-point plan to win back trust.

In a blog post, CEO Patrick Spence admits that the firm's app update "fell short" of its usual standards. Its pledges cover "software quality, customer experience, and delivering the excellence you deserve from Sonos."

They include an "unwavering commitment focus on customer experience", more stringent pre-release testing and "approaching change with humility", which includes gradual app changes rather than a radical overhaul and the ability to opt-in to test new features and provide feedback.

Sonos is also appointing a quality ombudsperson so employees can more easily raise concerns about product quality.

To win back customer trust, Sonos is adding another year to all existing speaker warranties, and will continue to roll out app updates every two-to-four weeks even once the current issues are fixed. It is also establishing a customer advisory board to provide feedback and insights from users in order to improve products before they launch.

The Sonos Executive Leadership Team has also pledged to not take an annual bonus for the October 2024 to September 2025 fiscal year "unless the company succeeds in improving the quality of the app experience and rebuilding customer trust". There's no mention though of how those metrics will be measured.

Admirable stuff, if a little self-important. But then Sonos needs to be seen to be improving. First, it rushed out the Ace wireless headphones, which lacked certain features at launch. Then came the app update which irked many loyal customers (and which Sonos CEO Patrick Spence initially defended as a "better experience"). The company has since realised the scale of its error, reportedly delaying two products while it works on fixing the app. 

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Sonos' products remain (mostly) great quality, but this whole debacle has hurt the brand somewhat. Here's hoping these steps help it regain some of its former glory.

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