Our New Quality and Customer Experience Commitments

Hi all,

We’ve been sharing app updates with you all over the last several months, and today we wanted to share commitments that we are announcing following our internal review of the app release in May of this year. In addition to all we have been doing to get you back to enjoying your Sonos products, these commitments will drive us to emerge from this with an even stronger commitment to quality. You can read highlights of the commitments below, and read more here: www.sonos.com/commitments.

To address the root causes of the problems of the app release, we commit to:

• Unwavering focus on the customer experience. To deliver the highest level of customer experience, we will always establish ambitious quality benchmarks at the start of product development. We will not launch products until they meet these criteria. We will also enhance the tools needed to measure and maintain the standards our customers expect.
• Increase the stringency of our pre-launch testing phases. Our beta testing program will include a broader range of customers and more diverse setups, helping us diagnose and resolve issues faster 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 your trust: 

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

As a demonstration of the significance of these commitments, the Sonos Executive Leadership Team will not 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.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Thanks for all of your support and patience the last several months - we’re excited to move forward and get you back to enjoying the quality that Sonos is known for.

Your Sonos team.

The changes seem to be around moving the entire ecosystem to the cloud.  Removing local network access and routing all streaming services through the Sonos cloud.

1. Is Sonos going to collect and monitize (now or in the future) user listening activity?
2. Will users have the option to use Sonos on a non internet connected network?
3. What if the internet goes out, will I be able to use my Sonos system locally, from a local music folder?
4. What if the Sonos cloud goes down?  Will streaming services still work?
5. Has there been a security audit of the Sonos cloud? Will you produce thouse results?
6. Why does the Sonos cloud not use 2FA?

This move to the cloud feels like Sonos trying to open up new revenue streams by monetizing user activity and I suspect forcing users into a cloud subscription service to use existing equipment or services.

Maybe they will offer something new or "AI" supported music assistant based on listening history.  

But this whole things feels like a shift from a speaker company to a cloud and data company.

A new way to offer ads to the end user where they could no do so before.