Patent ID: 7568001

Claim:
A method of escalating non-realtime customer communications in a contact, the method comprising: receiving said customer communications from customers, in a plurality of shared file folders, said shared file folders configured in a central processing area of the contact center; designating at least one of said customer communications as aged based on a set of predetermined escalation criteria; extracting the at least one aged customer communication from the plurality of shared file folders; routing the aged customer communication with an escalation service to an immediate workflow such that the aged customer communication is routed by the immediate workflow for immediate response to a first designated agent of a plurality of designated agents that send responses to customers; presenting the aged customer communication to the first designated agent such that the aged customer communication is displayed on a desktop of the first designated agent; and sending, under the direction of said first designated agent, a response to a customer associated with the aged customer communication on the desktop, wherein the escalation service is operable to escalate an immediate customer communication to the immediate workflow for routing to the first designated agent and wherein the escalation service checks a present threshold for a maximum number of immediate workflows and delays escalating the customer communications designated as immediate until the number of immediate workflows is below the threshold.