A system and method of escalating non-realtime communications entering a Contact Center. The present invention removes communications that may initially be viewed as requiring deferred assistance, such as those near missing their SLA or those determined to require immediate handling based on identifying a particular important customer, from its shared file folders and "escalating" them to be routed as a live communications, for immediate response by a designated agent. An alternative tiered service model for a digital multimedia contact center assigns an entering contact to an initial immediate or deferred 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 service tier is initially determined based on a media type associated with the contact. The digital multimedia contact center contains a set of media servers, each of which passes a contact of a particular media type to a workflow engine (one for each service tier--immediate and deferred), which executes workflows to direct the processing of contacts at service tiers that require agent activity, for the immediate service tier contacts pass through a set of media routers. Agents are allocated to contacts by a dynamic automated contact distributor and the appropriate media router is used to route the contact to an agent. The workflow engines also execute workflows for agents to control the allocation of agents to contacts.