When Great CX Falls Victim to Poor Management: A Head-Scratcher About Sonos ????

The key thing with listening to music at home is that it's an emotional experience aimed at helping to relax or lifting up the mood. Now, with a broken system, the opposite happens - it's frustrating, and trying to solve it (and failing) creates stress.

In the quest for excellent customer experience (CX), companies often struggle. But how much of this struggle is genuinely about CX complexity, and how much is simply poor management in disguise?

Disclaimer: Apologies for the slightly negative post. It's not usually my thing to speak badly of others, even though poor user experience has become a normal part of day-to-day life. Companies seek to automate more and more processes but often miss gaps and ignore journeys that weren't explicitly designed for. However, this story - including the open acknowledgement of decisions made - is just so bizarre to me that I felt compelled to share it.

The Sonos Meltdown ??

Consider the current Sonos situation, once a prime example of sleek user experience. I've been a proud and happy customer for years as I have loved the easy setup, sleek usability, clean design, and surprisingly punchy sound, but half of this is gone and today I can't actually use the system that sits in nearly every room of my home*.

Their recent (months ago) app update fiasco serves as a cautionary tale:

1. They made their customers switch to a new app, even if the old one worked fine. Why?
2. The new app does less than the old one. Which they knew?
3. They clearly didn't test it enough before release. What the...?
4. Months later, many customers are still struggling with a slow, clunky app and reduced or awkward functionality.

Now the CEO of Sonos has provided an open letter apologizing for this (see www.sonos.com/en-us/blog/update-on-the-sonos-app) - sounds like a positive step and active crisis management, no?

But for me, that letter makes it even worse: It clearly states that it was a conscious decision to launch an app with reduced functionality. How can you do that without being forced to? How can you take your existing customers and say, "Hey, swap for this app and no worries, we'll add some of the features you are using today back in later on"?

I won't get started on what they left out, but if you Google what's going on in the forums, you'll have hours of entertaining details - many of which make you really wonder. Nor about the lacking ability of their support channels to even remotely cope with that mess.

Seriously, in a world where you can stream music from just about anywhere, why would a market-leading company facing increasing competition make the choice to actively make the customer experience worse? ??

The Bigger Picture ??

Now let's step back for a moment. The really interesting questions for me are:

• How often are CX problems really just bad management in disguise? ??
• What is really going on? Are teams not talking to each other? Are the wrong things being rewarded? Is communication broken?
• How can a company care about its customers if the way it's run doesn't support that?
• Why do customers, shareholders, and (most sadly) employees have to suffer for a broken company setup?

Sure, it's easy to blame things like remote work, tough competition, or "picky" customers. But let's be real - a lot of the time, it comes down to the guidance given and how the company is set up. Blaming some app developers would really be unfair.

If we want to avoid these kinds of mess-ups, we need to take a hard look at how companies are managed. And believe me - it's not rocket science. With the right approach, companies can set themselves up to be able to put customers first - easily so.

What do you think? Have you seen other examples where decisions taken totally derailed the customer experience?

#CustomerExperience #Leadership #ProductDevelopment #LessonsLearned #OrganizationalChange #ManagementStrategy

P.S. If you're a leader wanting to avoid these kinds of CX disasters, check out leaderthon.com or stay tuned for the upcoming unify7 approach. We're on a mission to make creating innovative and customer-centric organizations easier.

* Note: To be clear, technically I am now (after quite some hours spent) at the point where I can listen to music again. It's just such a frustrating experience (especially with the extremely laggy app) that I have stopped using my Sonos system altogether.