Is your organization’s contact center inefficient with their time? Or maybe your contact center often finds itself over or understaffed at different times of the day? Many organizations can relate to these situations and aren’t sure how to resolve these issues. One of the main reasons why organizations are seeing these occurrences in their contact centers is because they are manually forecasting their call volumes by exporting call data from their phone systems and using spreadsheets to manually crunch numbers in an effort to forecast future call volumes. Workforce management (WFM) is the solution your organization needs to prevent inefficient forecasting and scheduling. In today’s blog post we will be focusing on forecasting in your contact center.

For starters, it’s important to understand that the foundation of a well-organized schedule comes from an accurate forecast of call volume. Without an accurate forecast the schedules produced are just guesses at best.

Research from SWPP says “Accuracy of forecasts is considered one of the top 3 most valuable capabilities for users of WFM systems.”

Forecasts are derived by historical call data where trends can be spotted. Day of the week factors, such as Monday versus Tuesday, are looked at to find specific patterns in call flow.

Analysts may ask themselves, “Are there more in the morning and less in the afternoon? Maybe there are spikes late in the evening just before the center closes.”

Secondly, long and short term planning are both crucial for contact centers. The more precise a forecast is to reality, the more efficiently a center can operate. Analysts can easily prepare for long term planning in their contact center by using a WFM system. For example, your business has been growing exponentially over the past year and expect the growth to continue. If you’re forecasting is accurate, you’re going to see that 3 months from now you’re going to need more staff. Analysts can begin planning and hiring more agents now so that your contact center isn’t understaffed down the road. For short term planning, analysts can create “what-if” scenarios (an example can be seen below) to review trends from historical call data. With all of this information a WFM user can begin to look long and short term to determine expected needs for staffing levels.

What-if scenario:

For instance, let’s say last year your company sent out an email about a promotion for a new product. When the email was sent out the calls to your contact center spiked. Forecasting tracks this trend and stores the data. A month later, you want to send out another promotional email but want to plan accordingly so you have just enough agents in the contact center. The what-if scenarios help you plan by looking at past historical data and trends to forecast what may happen during this similar scenario.

Lastly, the inclusion of seasonal factors is a key way to increase accuracy in a forecast. Algorithms specifically designed to analyze contact center data are able to spot trends month over month and quarter over quarter. This helps organizations better predict staffing levels around specific holidays, such as the holiday shopping season or back-to-school season. Analysts can review the historical call data to track the trends around this time of the year compared to previous years. Having this capability helps analysts and hiring managers determine the number of temporary agents needed for the season.

With WFM systems running on top-of-the-line data servers, the ability to conduct simulations of data is now possible. The increased accuracy once again yields better schedules for your contact centers. Utilizing a system that can automatically collect and store historical call volumes saves users time by no longer needing to export manual reports from system to system. This process is sometimes the only way that WFM analysts can get data from one system to another. When using spreadsheets and manual exports, human error comes into play and forecasts become less accurate. As a result, schedules become less accurate and contact centers are forced to manage on the fly to try to cover for poor initial planning.

CallCopy’s comprehensive yet easy-to-use workforce management solution, Clarity, removes the complexity from the challenge of forecasting and scheduling, allowing for effective contact center management. Now is the time to switch from spreadsheets to WFM. Click here for more information about workforce management.

Every year, new tech patents and court cases astonish the business world and reduce faith in the United States’ commitment to innovation. When Microsoft can patent page up and page down functions, Apple can patent the “Method for providing human input to a computer” (5-dimensional touch screens), and some random guy can patent a “Method of gravity distortion and time displacement” (read: time machine), we have to ask ourselves: What are tech and software patents actually accomplishing?

Many scholars and some judges, including some members of the Federal Circuit, (the appellate circuit that decides all patent cases), do not believe that software patents should be patent eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. Section 101 (“Section 101”).

For instance, in “CLS Bank Intl. v. Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd.,” decided May 10, 2013, the Court, sitting en banc, could not agree on how to test whether a software patent claim is too abstract to be patent-eligible under § 101. No single rationale enjoyed a majority, leaving only confusion for future courts as to the patent-eligibility of software.

The question of whether any software is patent eligible subject matter under Section 101 depends on which Federal Circuit judges are making the decision. The heart of the Section 101 challenge to software patents questions whether or not the software patents merely cover abstract ideas. Abstract ideas are not patent eligible subject matter under a judicially created exception to Section 101.

So when is a patent claim merely an abstract idea? You don’t know until all appeals have been exhausted because the Federal Circuit cannot even agree on the proper test.

A recent case demonstrates how extremely broad and abstract software claims have inexplicably survived judicial challenges. US Patent No. 7,346,545, “Method and system for payment of intellectual property royalties by interposed sponsor on behalf of consumer over a telecommunications network,” was granted to Ultramercial, Inc. in 2008.

Essentially, the patent covers the concept of showing a customer an ad instead of charging for content, and the trouble began when Ultramercial sued Hulu, WildTangent, and others for patent infringement in 2009. The Federal Circuit upheld the patent and both Hulu and WildTangent refused to roll over so the battle continued.

Hulu and WildTangent argued that Ultramercial’s patent was merely an abstract idea and not patent eligible subject matter. In 2011, the Federal Circuit denied their Section 101 challenge to the Ultramercial ruling, and in 2012, the Supreme Court asked the Court of Appeals to reconsider the decision. Still, on June 21, 2013, the Court of Appeals reaffirmed its earlier ruling that the claims were patent eligible subject matter. Ultramercial is now moving forward on its infringement claim in the District Court.

Of note, a Section 101 challenge does not decide the validity of the patent over the prior art – it determines if the method or system is even eligible for patent protection. If successful, Ultramercial will likely attempt to monetize the software patent against the likes of YouTube, Hulu, WildTangent and potentially thousands of other companies that display ads. Ultramercial could thereby drain much needed resources from the digital content world for years until the patent expires.

The basis for patent law is from the Constitution itself. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 empowers Congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writing and Discoveries.”

This raises many questions: What counts as a “Discovery”? How long should “limited Times” be? What is an “exclusive Right”? And how do we define “Progress”?

Naturally, the legal world continues to debate all these questions. Meanwhile, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) approves over 40,000 software patents per year and reviews each for a meager average of 18 hours, according to the EFF. We need only highlight a few statistics to recognize that current interpretations of the Copyright Clause are failing to support even the obtuse definitions of “progress.”

In 2011, researchers from Boston University found that direct and indirect costs of patent assertion entity litigation costs the US economy $80 billion each year. In the 5,842 defenses mounted against PAEs, 90 percent of the companies sued were small to medium-sized businesses.

In other words, PAEs seemed to disproportionately target startups and smaller businesses that lack the cash reserves for a protracted legal battle. Often, these are the same companies on the cutting edge of software innovation. We can imagine how different the world might be had PAEs targeted Google or Apple in their infancy. Now, the EFF reports that in 2011 both Apple and Google spent more on patent litigation and buying patents than they did on actual research.

In practice, the constitutional basis of patent law has been mistranslated by the legal and business world, and has thus failed to promote anything we might define as “progress.”

The appeal of starting and running a business in the United States is well known. The World Bank and International Finance Corporation’s 2012 Ease of Doing Business Index ranks the United States fourth after Singapore, Hong Kong, and New Zealand.

If we calculated patent law into the index alongside the ease of starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity and similar metrics, the picture might change rather dramatically — though not for New Zealand.

On May 14, 2013, the New Zealand House of Representatives put forth a bill that redefines software: “A computer program is not an invention and not a manner of manufacture for the purposes of this Act.”

Software is no longer an invention in New Zealand, but the amended laws will still permit the patenting of software when it is part of a novel piece of hardware. Thus, if a company invented a blender than required hardware-specific software, that software could be protected under the blender’s patent.

On June 7, 2013 the German Bundestag followed suit. The legislature issued a joint motion requiring the German government to ensure that computer programs are only covered by copyright and therefore cannot be patented.

This protects the ingenuity of source code, but not the purpose of the said code. So, the law supports competition by encouraging multiple companies to all produce software for a single, useful purpose.

Arguably, New Zealand and Germany’s amendments to patent law protect both startups and tech giants far more effectively than US law.

The question then is, why shouldn’t we simply abolish software patents now?

Perhaps that is the course this country will take, but in the immediate term, it may be prudent to see how such legislation affects New Zealand and Germany. The abolishment of software patents could deter capital-intensive software development, or companies may find clever ways around the law. Both countries have chosen to be in that experiment and the US may as well play scientist.

Short of abolishing software patents, switching from a 20- to a five-year limit could provide immediate benefits.

First, as Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, pointed out in his three-part series in Forbes, software has a much shorter innovation cycle and lower capital requirements compared to pharmaceuticals and machinery, which require investments in laboratories and manufacturing facilities. Using the popularity of open source software as evidence, Goldman argues that software development would benefit from much shorter patent lives.

As in Germany, software developers could protect their source code, visual layouts and documentation with copyrighting. The five-year lifecycle would reward innovators for their hard work without putting a wrench in the global evolution of software.

Second, if highly vague and abstract ideas or overgeneralized and common sense “inventions” like Ultramercial’s patent on ad content continue to pass through the patent office, at least a five-year life can lay them to rest rather quickly.

A five-year lifecycle is only the first step in changing patent law to actually “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

Here are 3 advantages YOU can gain from workforce management:

1. Improved Accuracy

• The accuracy of schedules is difficult to guarantee when using spreadsheets and is often prone to human error. This can lead to inaccurate staffing models and forecasts with incorrect predictions. Spreadsheets consist of combining a lot of data and information from different sources resulting in a ton of manual work.  Forecasting uses a lot of historical data and in-depth calculations which is hard to produce accurately with spreadsheets. WFM uses algorithms to analyze historical data to identify and forecast call patterns. Schedules are then generated to meet service goals and ensure optimal coverage.

2. Save Time

• Spreadsheets are time consuming to load and format data, whereas, WFM systems automatically do this for you. Spreadsheets become more difficult to use and produce results slowly when looking at more than 20 staff members. Managing PTO and time-off requests through spreadsheets or email is not an easy task. A WFM system can do this for you through auto approve or deny requests. Retrospective analysis of in and out times of employees can be easily reported on with a WFM system. Using a spreadsheet tool requires many calculations and data loads that might only be available directly from a database which can be a timely task.

3. Valuable Insights

• Real-time metrics collected manually or through 3rd party applications are very hard to compare to forecasted values. By using a WFM system, this information is continually available and updated with no human intervention. Reporting allows organizations to  identify areas for operational improvements and cost savings. Visibility into staffing trends and performance provides ways to uncover opportunities for streamlining labor usage.

All in all, spreadsheets are not very accurate, time consuming, and do not provide useful insights. Are you contemplating the effectiveness of spreadsheets? Now is the time your organization should begin thinking about workforce management solution, the better alternative! WFM is a powerful tool for optimizing operational efficiencies, employee satisfaction and ultimately the customer experience. Stay tuned for more in-depth WFM posts.

Speech analytics can dramatically increase a contact center’s ability to:

1. quickly uncover customer insights,
2. identify key issues and complaints,
3. prevent high-impact incidents and
4. handle customer interactions more effectively and efficiently.

Not sure where to get started? We have put together a guide to help your organization make a smooth transition when integrating speech analytics. This whitepaper breaks down the processes and steps your organization should take when getting started along with who should be involved in the transition. This guide gives you the step-by-step instructions to incorporating a successful speech analytics solution.

Topics covered in the whitepaper include:

• Forming a winning analytics team
• Selecting the analytics tool that’s best for you
• Define desired outcomes and measuring success

Click here to download 6 Steps to Speech Analytics Success: A Guide to Getting Started with Speech Analytics for more information.

In 2003, Apple patented the glass staircase that appears in some of their stores.

In 2012, Apple successfully sued Samsung for creating a screen that can distinguish between 1 or 2 fingers touching it. They also sued Samsung for copying the iPhone shapes, white and black colors, and rounded icons, among other things.

And today, Google Maps might get shut down in Germany for violating Microsoft’s patent on “computer system for identifying local resources and method therefor.”

Of the above cases, only Selden’s patent was successfully challenged in 1911, thanks to Henry Ford. The others still stand along with Amazon’s patent on a one-click purchase button.

The absurdity of these patents is not even half as frustrating as the shameless efforts to exploit the broken system. Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Google, Nokia and HTC spend billions in the so-called “smartphone wars” trying to strangle each other in the courts, rather than spending hard-earned cash on R&D. Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs), also known as “patent trolls,” acquire patents with no intention to ever develop the products or processes: they simply aim to collect licensing fees or blackmail companies into settlements.

If Selden could not maintain such an absurd patent in 1911, why can software companies today secure even more preposterous patents? Why can companies exploit erroneous patents to bleed out competitors, stifle innovation, and squash upstarts? Why can “patent trolls” so easily exploit America’s innovators?

Legislation Has Fallen Short

The US patent system is not only broken—it’s being flagrantly abused to stifle innovation, penalize inventors, and lock great companies into epically pointless litigation from which only lawyers leave the better.

Government efforts to address this issue have been underwhelming and ineffective.

On September 16, 2011, President Obama signed the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA), aiming to protect startup innovators from legal tricks utilized by moneyed infringers. However, the AIA did not go far enough, and has in fact backfired. Ex parte patent reexaminations have tripled since the bill came into force because patent infringers now blackmail patent-holders with the threat of reexamination. The bill was supposed to reduce legal threats.

The new “First Inventor to File” rules, which replaced the age-old “First to Invent” standard, have also reduced startup access to venture capital, since startups often do not have a sufficient conception, proof of functionality and business plan until after they earn venture backing. Conversely, venture capitalists cannot risk backing companies until they have the patent. Both investors and high-tech startups now struggle with this Catch-22.

The problem is getting worse: suits brought by patent trolls have actually increased from 29% of all infringement suits to 62% of all infringement suits over the last 2 years alone. The White House claims that trolls may have threatened over 100,000 companies in the past year.

At this point, the patent system cannot be band-aided so easily, despite the White House’s best intentions. On June 4, the Obama administration announced 5 executive actions and 7 legislative recommendations to better protect America’s innovators. They are a mixed bag.

Encouragingly, the White House wants congress to give district courts discretion to make abusive plaintiffs responsible for the defendant’s legal fees, and they want Congress to incentivize public filing of demand letters to limit abusive suits. Making plaintiffs responsible for legal fees could deter unscrupulous companies from attempting to distract competitors, who are strong-arming them for licensing fees with the threat of legal action if they don’t comply.

The Executive Orders demand:

1. That patent applicants and owners regularly update ownership information so that trolls cannot use shell companies to hide the full extent of their patent holdings from companies they target in abusive litigation.
2. That the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) train examiners to weed out overly broad software patent claims.
3. That the PTO creates “education and outreach materials” that “offer answers to common questions by those facing demands from a possible troll.”
4. That more research, discussion, and data production occur.
5. A review of procedures that Custom and Borders Protection and the International Trade Commission use to evaluate exclusions barring the import of infringing goods.

Despite the nice intentions, the White House has not done enough to stem abusive patent litigation. As it stands, a company could probably patent the process of embedding Google Maps on a webpage—or patent the ability to purchase products and services inside a mobile app. Oh, wait, Lodsys already has that patent.

If profoundly ludicrous patents breeze through the Patent and Trademark Office, trolls prey on companies, big companies prey on little companies, and tech giants slap lawsuits to each other like leeches, clearly patent law is broken. Congress must take stronger measures to stop the bullying and set America back on a path of innovation.

In line with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Defend Innovation Project, I recommend seven simple changes to patent law that would stem the unchecked growth of exploitative litigation:

1. Software patents should last no longer than five years from the application date.

Currently, patents last for twenty years, which is an outdated time frame given the pace of software innovation. Patent lengths should reflect the speed of innovation within individual industries.

2. If a patent is invalid or there is not infringement, the plaintiff should be responsible for the legal fees.

Trolls and predatory tech companies frequently use the threat of a protracted legal battle to blackmail alleged infringers into an out-of-court settlement, even though the defendant would probably win in court. Making the plaintiff responsible will discourage this abuse.

3. Patent applicants should be required to provide an example of running software code for each claim in the patent.

If a patent troll lacks the ability to implement a software concept, why does it deserve a patent? Do I deserve a patent for a hovering skateboard that I cannot create? Absolutely not. This requirement would prevent trolls from patenting concepts and processes that they intend to exploit rather than produce. This will let great thinkers and inventors actually bring these ideas to market.

4. Infringers should not be liable for independently arriving at a patented invention.

Software code is mathematics – therefore, it should come as no surprise that multiple people often reach the same or similar code. Making such independent innovators liable is like accusing a student of plagiarism because he or she solved a math problem but submitted the exam after another student. You should not be able to patent common sense processes and single-answer solutions.

5. Patents and licenses should be public right away.

Otherwise, how can innovators know if they are infringing on a patent? It’s wrong to let enterprising coders invest time, money, and passion into a product only to fall into a patent troll’s booby trap. Patent owners should be required to keep their public records up-to-date.

6. Patent law should limit damages so that a patent owner cannot collect millions of dollars if the patent represented only a tiny fraction of a defendant’s product.

Should a teenager get the death penalty for stealing a candy bar? No. Then why should a startup be given the fiscal death penalty for infringing on a patent that is a miniscule component of their software? If an alleged infringer is not making millions on a patent, they should not be liable for millions.

7. Congress should commission a study and hold hearings to examine whether software patents actually benefit the economy.

According to researchers form the Technical University of Lisbon, a stunning 91% of all technologies that have received an “R&D 100 Award” from the academic journal Research & Development between 1977 and 2004 were not patented. Across the board, scholarly studies have challenged the notion that patents protect economically useful inventions. Indeed, mounting evidence shows that the opposite is true – patents stifle more innovations than they protect.

Only countries with enlightened legal institutions can sustain long-term economic growth, facilitate innovation, and benefit from the genius of resourceful creators. So long as malicious companies and opportunistic patent assertion entities can cannibalize the productivity and ingenuity of America’s tech community, advancements will stall, great ideas will crash before they ever take off.

Customers use cc: Discover to reach peak operating performance. So what is the secret sauce that sets this solution apart? Simply this: CallCopy practices what it preaches. Customer satisfaction is the key driver that motivates its staff to set the standard for quality. Customer feedback informs our efforts in every step forward.

Testimony of this is recognition in DMG Consulting’s 2013 Product and Market Report that CallCopy earned #1 rank for Overall Vendor Satisfaction and Overall Product Satisfaction. CallCopy has received this top overall rating for the past three consecutive years!

CallCopy customers were asked to rate its’ performance in 26 areas. Results are compared to over a dozen leading WFO suite vendors to find CallCopy far outperformed many of them. CallCopy is the top performer in this respected industry survey, cementing its place as top contact center WFO solution provider.

DMG measured customer participants’ satisfaction with their vendors with regard to implementation, training, ongoing service and support, product innovation, responsiveness to product enhancement requests, ease of configuration/ use/ maintenance, ease of integration with third-party applications, security features and suite breadth of functionality.

For details, visit 2013 DMG Report Reprint.

KPI dashboards support service quality monitoring of common interactions including purchasing products and services, checking order and shipment status, bill payment and adjustment, account status inquiries, inquiries about product use, service delivery, information requests and expressions of compliments and suggestions.

KPI dashboards enable staff to adopt a cultured discipline for responding quickly to emerging challenges and changes to improve efficiency and effectiveness, and thus contribute to profitable growth. Viewing performance in snapshots and as trends with instant access to customer interaction detail makes KPI dashboards powerful tools for customer-focused enterprises to use to excel.

Effective performance management draws big data from relevant sources across and outside the enterprise. Consolidated and analyzed, this information is visible and actionable through role-based KPI dashboards. Big data input to KPI metrics is crucial to achieving a complete, consistent and reliable picture of the ‘truth’ about organizational performance.

For information about CallCopy’s new performance management KPI dashboard click on Insight.

cc: Discover protects patient interaction recordings by limiting access to protected health information (PHI) to authorized users. In addition to role-based access security, the system provides file-level encryption and audit trail reporting for monitoring required compliance procedures.

Applying on-the-fly 256-bit file-level encryption, the system ensures stored records cannot be read without correct passwords/key-files or encryption keys. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption protects network communication during recording and playback. PHI data is encrypted prior to and during recording, including video being streamed from a workstation and any audio being transmitted from a remote server to the core file storage location.

cc: Discover security settings force password adherence. Passwords must be complex with at least seven characters, numeric and alphabetic, in upper and lower case. Users must change passwords periodically and not re-use them. They must re-authenticate after 15 minutes of idle time. And, access is blocked after six incorrect login attempts.

cc: Discover includes an extensive activity tracking system that enables conducting full trace audits to determine who has accessed any recording. In addition to flexible recording and secure storage, the system enables customizable archival rules so records may be auto-archived and/or purged in compliance with HIPAA and HITECH rules.

With CallCopy’s solution suite deployed, now DePaul’s Contact Central handles 294% more calls with a two-tiered handling structure, delivering faster and better service with fewer agents. CallCopy’s speech analytics helped DePaul identify why students are calling and informed the process for escalating calls that need expert handling.

To learn how DePaul University’s Central Contact Center benefits from CallCopy’s tools, view ICMI’s video podcast. Click DePaul University’s Central Contact Center: Using Quality Assurance Tools for R&D.

CallCopy’s monthly education webinars consists of four separate modules, segmented by core role. Because these roles may overlap in your organization, users are welcome to attend as many modules as necessary. Learn more about each of these sessions and get registered today!

End-User – Call recording search, retrieval, playback and organization; Reporting

QA - Pre-planning, creating and maintaining QA Forms; Reporting

Speech Analytics – Creating and fine-tuning speech phrases; Reporting

System Admin – Moves, adds and maintenance  for the system; Records retention

Every month our education specialists deliver live webinars so that you can ask the experts your questions, interact with peers and learn new tips & tricks for your call recording solution.