How do I escalate an AV fault that's not getting resolved?

If an AV fault has been ticketed more than twice, has produced more than one engineer visit and is still not fixed, escalate in writing through four explicit asks: a named technical contact, a written root-cause analysis (RCA), a 30-day stabilisation plan and, if those don't land, escalation to the account director. A good support contract will have these mechanisms baked in; a poor one will resist them, which is itself useful information.

Ask 1: a named technical contact. Your SLA should specify a senior engineer or technical account manager who owns recurring or complex faults, distinct from the rotating helpdesk first-line. If you don't already have one, asking for "a single named engineer to own this ticket through to resolution" is reasonable and standard. If the integrator can't or won't provide one, that's a structural problem with the support model, not a one-off failure.

Ask 2: a written root-cause analysis. After every Priority 1 incident or any fault that's recurred three times, request a one-page RCA covering: timeline of the incident, what failed (hardware, firmware, network, configuration, user), why it failed, what fix was applied and what change prevents recurrence. An integrator who can't write an RCA either doesn't understand what happened or hasn't actually fixed it. Many recurring faults are recurring precisely because the previous "fix" was a workaround that was never documented.

Ask 3: a 30-day stabilisation plan. If a specific room or system has had three or more tickets in a month, ask for a written plan with weekly checkpoints: monitoring instrumentation added, configuration audit completed, firmware brought to a known-good baseline, peripheral cabling re-terminated, network path verified end-to-end. The plan should commit to no further P1 incidents in the 30-day window or specify a credit / corrective action.

Ask 4: escalation to the account director. Most integrators have a commercial escalation path above the support manager. Use it once the technical asks above have been refused or unmet. The wording is "I'd like to formally escalate this to the account director with a view to reviewing whether the current support arrangement is fit for purpose."

If your integrator can't articulate why a fault keeps happening after these escalations, that's no longer a support issue, it's a procurement issue. The same questions you'd ask of a new integrator (named contact, RCA process, stabilisation methodology) are the criteria you should have screened for at proposal stage. See Strive AV's support service for what good escalation looks like, and the proposal red flags article for the upstream procurement filter.

Quick reference: four written asks in order: named technical contact, written RCA after each P1 or third recurrence, 30-day stabilisation plan with weekly checkpoints, escalation to account director. If those are refused, it's a procurement problem, not a support problem.