Heath Evans really needed his Sonos speakers to work.

He and his wife used one of their three wireless devices to play a lullaby to put their baby daughter to sleep.

So when Sonos released a new controller app in May that was riddled with issues and didn’t make the speakers work, Evans was furious.

“All we need is some reliable music to play a lullaby while our screaming baby tries to sleep,” says the 40-year-old Australian, whose wife gave him the speakers for his birthday last year. Entrepreneur Evans said.

Fed up with the amount of time it took for Sonos to fully fix the app, the family gave up on the nearly $1,300 device. They turned to cheaper speakers instead to stream music for their daughter’s bedtime.

Evans is one of many disgruntled customers who are upset with Santa Barbara-based Sonos. The company is still working to mitigate the impact of the app fiasco and restore its reputation as a powerhouse in the audio industry with a range of portable, high-quality wireless speakers. The success of the Sonos brand has made it more likely that rivals such as Amazon, Bose, Apple and other big tech companies that make smart speakers will win over more customers.

Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at research firm Forrester, said, “While Sonos has built customer trust, it operates in a highly competitive space, which puts the company in a precarious position.” “We are aware that this is the case,” he said in an email.

For more than 20 years, the publicly traded company has weathered difficult times, including the 2008 financial crisis. But the company’s latest misstep is a multimillion-dollar fiasco, delaying new product launches and undercutting sales forecasts for the critical final months of the year just as it is trying to take advantage of increased holiday sales. We had no choice but to make a downward revision.

Sonos said it is spending $20 million to $30 million to fix the app and provide more customer support. The company hopes that this emergency investment will restore customer trust and stabilize its financial base. The company’s stock, which closed Thursday at $11.58, has fallen 39% in the past six months. For the quarter ending June 29, the company reported revenue of $397 million, up 6% from the same period last year, and net income of $3.7 million.

This week, the company outlined a plan to prevent similar mistakes from happening in the future. This includes improving the way it tests products before launch, appointing a “quality ombudsman” and establishing a customer advisory committee. , extends warranties on certain products such as home theater and plug-in speaker products. Management has agreed to forgo annual bonuses for 2025 unless the turnaround plan is successful.

“There are many great brands that have made mistakes, gone out of their way to fix things, apologized, and regained the trust of their customers,” said Eddie Lazarus, chief strategy officer at Sonos. “We’re going to be next in line.”

Sonos was founded in 2002 by a group of entrepreneurs who set out to create something commonplace today but pioneering at the time: a wireless audio system that could play music over the Internet from anywhere in your home. They worked years before the launch of popular streaming services like Spotify and Pandora and the launch of the iPhone.

In January 2005, company has released the ZP100, a device with a remote control that allows you to stream music through your computer. The product received positive reviews, including Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg, who called the Sonos music streaming system “by far the best I’ve seen or tested.” “Music Streaming Product.”

Like many startups, Sonos executives were concerned about competitors. The first song publicly played on the ZP100 was the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” a song that resonated with engineers working to improve the device’s quality before its release.

Speaking on the podcast How I Built This with Guy Raz this year, one of the company’s founders, John McFarlane, talked about the pressure he and others felt to launch their first product in time for the holidays. Although I reminisced, I ultimately failed to achieve my goal. If the company had released the ZP100 before it was ready, “the company would have gone out of business,” he said.

“If we were going to build a brand through word of mouth, we needed a great first experience,” MacFarlane said.

The challenge of balancing rapid response and great products is one that Sonos and other technology companies continue to grapple with throughout their history. Chatterjee said Apple faced backlash from customers in 2012 when it released a mapping app that included inaccurate driving directions. But Sonos is in an even more troubling position. That’s because the app is part of the way the company’s audio systems work seamlessly for the 15 million homes that use its products around the world.

“If you don’t have that seamlessness, you don’t have ease of use. Without ease of use, the company can’t give consumers a premium price or have a premium position in the market,” he said. Ta.

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence acknowledged that the company had let its customers down. In August, after Sonos released its quarterly results, he told investors that the company was addressing “performance and reliability issues” and that it was growing with “expansion into new categories and ambitious international expansion.” He said the app needs to be rebuilt to be ready for the next phase. Sonos released its first headphones in June.

For some Sonos customers like Evans, Sonos’ response has been “tone-deaf” and confirms that the company still needs to regain trust.

“Why on earth should I care about a quality ombudsman? I’m a guy sitting in Melbourne raising a baby in Australia and my speaker doesn’t work,” he said.

Lazarus said the company is considering the possibility of bringing back previous versions of the Sonos app, but has ruled it out due to a number of “technical concerns.” The company said it had reintroduced many of the features in the previous version of the app that were missing in the new version, but admitted the company still has work to do. He could not say when the app would be fully fixed.

Other customers have found a workaround that allows them to stream music from their Sonos speakers even if the app doesn’t work.

Matthew Mochniak, a 32-year-old product designer, said he disabled automatic app updates on his Sonos system because he feared problems with rolling out new apps, but the solution only worked temporarily.

Mochniak, who lives in North Carolina and spent more than $2,000 on Sonos speakers, said he can stream music through Apple’s Airplay feature.

Mochniak, who works in the technology industry, knows that rebuilding software is harder than it looks. “It’s very easy to commit to specific features or specific deadlines,” he says. “It’s also easy to forget that there are people on the other side who are responsible for that.”

British creative director Ben Brown, 49, said the Sonos app still shows the speaker as not connected. Instead, he uses Amazon’s Alexa assistant to play music on his speakers.

Brown, who also purchased multiple Sonos speakers for her home, said she was so frustrated that she felt the urge to throw her Sonos Roam portable speaker into the ocean while on vacation.

“I actually wouldn’t have done that, but that’s how infuriating it is,” he said. “These are the moments when you want to take your speakers outside to eat dinner and listen to music.”