Workflows in the service industry sometimes need to deal with multi-fold increases in customer demand within a short period of time. Such spikes in service demand may be caused by a variety of events including promotional deals, launching of new products, major news or natural disasters. Escalation strategies can be incorporated into the design of a workflow so that it can cope with sudden spikes in the number of service requests while providing acceptable execution times. In this paper, we propose a method for evaluating escalation strategies using simulation technology. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on a workflow from an insurance company. © 2009 IEEE.