Opinion: I’m not sure Spence and co. missing their bonus for a year is going to make a difference
Sonos is still trying to clean up the mess it made in May, when its app overhaul (which took “courage” don’t forget) went from an exciting move to the tech blunder of the year.
Now, after months of customer complaints and internal chaos, CEO Patrick Spence and his team have rolled out a seven-point plan promising to fix things.
But after reading the company’s “commitments“, I’m left wondering if this a genuine attempt to right some wrongs, or just an endeavour at dousing the flames with a blast from the PR hose?
My feeling, for the many, many vociferous critics over on the Sonos Subreddit and the Sonos Community Forum is that it won’t change the mood in the camp at all.
In fact, there are parts of the plan that are sure to further incite the vitriol.
But let’s start with the positives… and there are a couple.
For starters, Sonos is offering an extra year of warranty for its plug-in speakers and sound systems. I’m not sure why that confidence isn’t extended to the likes of the Roam or Move speakers, nor the Ace headphones, but it’s better than nothing.
The Santa Barbara brand is also keen to stress that it has made strides in reintroducing missing features from the May app release, with more than 80% of the app’s missing features reintroduced, a number than will hit almost 100% in the coming weeks.
The fact that Sonos is effectively celebrating putting missing parts back is a sign of what a major balls-up the new app launch was in the first place though.
But that level of balls-up shouldn’t happen again, thanks to the new “commitments.”
Reports in recent weeks have suggested that, internally, Sonos engineers and employees raised concerns about the revamped app before it launched in May, warnings that were seemingly ignored.
But that won’t happen again, according to the new plan, as Sonos has vowed to improve transparency internally by appointing a Quality Ombudsperson to ensure employees have a way to escalate concerns.
If you’re a Sonos fan hoping for real change, this sounds like a good step. But dig a little deeper, and things start to feel off.
For starters, many of these “new” commitments are simply basic best practices that any tech company should have had in place to begin with.
Take the promise of “unwavering focus on the customer experience” – isn’t that something we should expect from a brand as premium as Sonos?
The pledge to only launch products when they meet “ambitious quality benchmarks” feels like a no-brainer for any company selling $900 soundbars.
Even the extended beta testing phase Sonos promises to implement is another sign that they may have cut corners in the first place.
Beta testing that includes more customers and devices is something they should have already been doing, especially given the huge tech savvy user base that they can tap into.
The fact that they didn’t catch these issues before the May release shows a real disconnect between leadership and real-world usage.
“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.” This reads like pure PR corporate jargon; a way to say, “We’ll do better,” without really saying much at all.
But perhaps the most absurd part of the plan, and the one that will have the Reddit and Community forum mobs upgrading their pitchforks, is the statement around the executive bonus situation.
Sonos’ leadership, who green-lit this disastrous rollout don’t forget – despite “yelling” and “screaming” from concerned employees – have graciously decided they won’t take their bonuses for fiscal year 2025 if they don’t fix the app (and presumably it will be they who decide if the app is ‘fixed’.)
I’m not sure that withholding bonuses is likely to be the accountability moment Sonos’ board thinks it is and is, let’s be frank, laughably disconnected from how the average customer might perceive the situation.
The deeper issue with Sonos’ plan is that it feels reactionary, as though the brand is responding to an emergency rather than addressing systemic problems.
On that, Sonos is creating a “Customer Advisory Board” to give users a voice in product development. That’s great and it’s definitely a step in the right direction, but why did it take a crisis to get here?
Sonos’ plan is filled with promises that sound great on paper, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s one great big PR exercise, a few weeks ahead of Sonos’ next big product launch.
What the company really needs is to rebuild trust from the ground up – and that’s going to take more than withholding bonuses and buzz words.
