Mark Pincus Blog

Another bad sonos customer story - when proactive support goes too far!

i'm sorry to say that i have another bad story to report.

thursday i received an email from corey, who's now become my personal interface to the company (given my past saga), telling me about this 'exciting' new opportunity to 'hook up my friends' and let them try the system for a month with no purchase necessary. (ok, sorry but didnt we get this offer on late night tv about 20 years ago? and avoid it then?). like any normal person, i deleted this as annoying spam.

the kicker...i get a call from corey on my cellphone friday. i wouldnt have taken it but harder to know who's calling than emailing. he asks me if i have received their exciting offer and whether i want to 'hook my friends up'? now i get confused and think maybe there's more to it, but nope, he truly believes i'm going to be excited about this enough to interrupt a pretty busy morning, and wants to make sure i know about the $100 in sonos credits i can also earn in the program for each friend. i didnt want to sound bad, but common! WFT!?

this is an example of a company that seems to have little input or direction from its management. they have told me they've followed my blog. why wouldnt i ever hear from the ceo or vp marketing? i'm not soo arrogant as to think they need to talk to me, but how about a sonos blog?

and either the management is letting the customer support guys go awry and call innocent customers with stupid offers or worse they have directed and sanctioned this. i hate to come down so hard on a company with a really cool product and vision that IS being proactive in trying to help me. maybe they perceive such a cult that they think customers are just looking for more ways to help them sell. guess i missed that round of koolaid.

anyway, message to sonos ceo, get a hold of your customer support guys and make them delete my cell phone number!

Sonos - mixed review

i recently purchased the sonos wireless multi room music player with great excitement. my hope was that i could play my itunes music throughout many different rooms. while the concept is great, the product delivered the worst out of box experience i have ever had. the Mac software immediately requires registering with the company and downloading new software to work. needless to say this did not work either. as is the case with many bleeding edge products, you spend way more hours futzing to try to get it to work than the end result ever merits.

what is surprising however, is the lack of understanding this company has for how to deal with consumers. now, they are located in silicon valley, where most companies believe great technology can make up for bad marketing. but that is no excuse for doing things that are just plain stupid. when i asked the support rep why they would ship a product with incompatible software, he said it was too late and already 'in the box'.

the senior tech rep did eventually fix my problems and i do love the concept of moving your music throughout a large living area (for me it's 4 buildings on an old ranch). my advice would be that you wait for version 2.0 of this whole concept unless you're very patient.