A tiered service model for a digital multimedia contact center assigns an entering contact to an initial service tier based on routing criteria for the contact and may escalate or de-escalate the contact to a different service tier if the routing criteria changes. The routing criteria is initially determined based on a media type associated with the contact. The digital multimedia contact center contains a set of media routers, each of which passes a contact of a particular media type to a workflow engine which executes workflows to direct the processing of contacts at service tiers that require agent activity. Agents are allocated to contacts by a dynamic automate contact distributor and the appropriate media router is used to route the contact to an agent. The workflow engine also executes workflows for agents to control the allocation of agents to contacts.