PPLPRS, a rant: fine concept, useless execution.

Written Jun 7, 2018, tagged under post,incompetence,PPLPRS,useless

I'm very happy with the idea that people need to pay for a licence to use music commercially; it adds to a business, and the musicians creating it deserve to get a payback for it. Mrs H uses music to create a beautiful ambience in her yoga classes, for instance, and rightly pays for that use. However, the organisation responsible for managing that licence and taking payment - PPLPRS, a joint venture between the PPL and PRS for Music - is literally worse than useless at administration.

Since signing up when she started teaching in 2014, we've gone through a little dance every year, which typically runs as follows:

The Invoice

They send an email with an invoice, which is always identified as spam - entirely reasonably, since it is indistinguishable from a phishing attempt. It typically starts something like this:

From: no-reply@ppluk.com
To: [the raw email address on Ellie's website]
Subject: New paper-free Invoice from PPL

Please find attached your new document from PPL. 
This is an automated email. Please refer to the attached document 
for ways to contact us or pay an invoice.

How many emails do you receive that claim to be an invoice, have an attached PDF and don't use your name anywhere in the message? I expect most of them disappear without trace.

Debt Collection

What would you do next after sending this? Perhaps email a reminder? Or phone? No, for this organisation the very next step after this useless email is to pass the invoice to a debt collection agency. They arrange for a letter to arrive on your doormat from Oriel, who then proceed to harass you regularly by phone.

Hours on the phone

To attempt to get things back on track, you then spend a few hours on the phone with their customer support people ... after having listened to "Somewhere Only We Know" by Keane about 14 times (here's a Spotify playlist I've built based on the songs I've had while on hold to them). It's a good song, but surely the actual people who manage licensing could spread the net a bit wider?

Eventually you get through to a real person, who to date has without exception been polite and reasonable, making a good effort to get the problem sorted. You come off the phone feeling that, at last, the problem is in hand.

The Follow-Up

Particularly this year, this is where the fun really starts. We had decided to change to a direct debit payment method, in an attempt to avoid the same problems in subsequent years. I have now had set up not one, not two but THREE different direct debit mandates. The first one, for some reason, only covered a part of the licence; the second one apparently had something wrong with it, and the third - well, the surcharge emails are still arriving as of this morning, so I'm guessing it will go the same way.

So it's back on the phone, Keane, speaking to the helpdesk and then waiting for the next problem.

What's going wrong?

Given that the people I've spoken to have always seemed perfectly capable, I can only assume that it is the management and systems/IT at PPLPRS that are worse than useless. For instance, why would an organisation raise surcharge invoices and send them out to someone who has a direct debit agreement in place? Why would Oriel still have instructions to chase an invoice covered by direct debit? Why would a strongly worded ticket raised through the website (customer service case 00069474, raised on 24th May '18, where "We aim to get back to you as quickly as we can, but please allow up to 10 working days for a response") lay un-answered in any way?

That complaint said that, if they didn't get their act together, I'd go public with my complaints. Combine that with this morning's unwelcome surcharge email - a terrible start to an already pressured school day - and you get this blog post.

As far as I'm concerned, they have everything they need to sort this matter out, so it's entirely in their hands now. I think perhaps I'll just document their behaviour from here on in, to see if it gets any better.