How quickly can you respond to an AV fault?

A standard contractual response is 4 hours on critical faults and next-business-day on minor faults under 8x5 cover (business hours, Monday to Friday). Faster tiers exist where the cost of downtime justifies them, and the right SLA depends on what an outage actually costs your organisation per hour, not on the headline price of the cover.

The standard tiering most UK integrators offer breaks down as follows. Bronze / 8x5 is reactive cover during business hours: 4-hour response on critical (room down, all-hands meeting affected), same-day or next-business-day on minor (one peripheral failed, room still usable). Silver / 12x5 or 8x6 extends cover to evenings or Saturdays. Gold / 24x7 is round-the-clock with 1 to 2-hour response on critical, suited to trading floors, hospitality venues, broadcast studios, university exam halls and any room where a failure during the booked window is a business event.

Most faults never need an on-site visit. A well-run helpdesk fixes 60 to 80% of incidents through remote triage: rebooting a Teams Rooms appliance, pushing a firmware update, re-pairing a Bluetooth peripheral, clearing a frozen control processor. That's why response time on the contract matters more than engineer-on-site time. If your incumbent quotes "4-hour engineer dispatch" but doesn't do remote triage first, the response time is misleading.

Watch for the difference between contractual SLA (a credit if the response is missed) and best-efforts (a target with no contractual remedy). Cheaper providers quote response times on a best-efforts basis, which means nothing if the room is down on a Friday afternoon. Out-of-hours work outside the contracted cover window typically attracts a 1.5x or 2x surcharge on the engineer's hourly rate, plus a minimum 4-hour booking. Check this before signing.

The right SLA is a function of downtime cost: a £200/hour boardroom needs Bronze, a £20,000/hour trading floor needs Gold. See Strive AV's support service for the tiering options.

Quick reference: Bronze 8x5 (4-hour critical, next-business-day minor), Silver 12x5 / 8x6, Gold 24x7 (1-2 hour critical). Most faults fix remotely. Match the tier to downtime cost, not cover cost.