Our Service Level Agreements
Real contractual commitments — not marketing claims. Published openly because we're confident in our delivery.
Most IT providers talk about their response times in marketing copy. Few publish their actual contractual commitments. We do — because we believe transparency builds trust, and because we're confident enough in our service delivery to put financial penalties behind missed targets.
This page sets out the SLAs that apply to every Genmar IT support contract. The figures below are not aspirations or averages — they are the contractual minimums we commit to, with service credits applied when we miss them.
Our average P1 response time across all clients in the past 12 months is under 15 minutes. The SLA below sets the floor; in practice, we routinely exceed it.
All Genmar IT clients receive these SLAs as standard. There is no premium tier required to access them and no contractual lock-in to specific severity definitions. If we miss a target, service credits apply automatically — you don't have to ask.
How We Define Severity
We use a multi-dimensional severity framework rather than a single "how urgent does it feel" scale. This removes ambiguity and ensures that priority is determined by genuine business impact, not by who shouts loudest. Each severity level is defined by four criteria: business and financial risk, work stoppage scale, percentage of end users affected, and whether an acceptable workaround exists.
Severity 1 Critical | Severity 2 High | Severity 3 Medium | Severity 4 Low | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business / Financial Risk | Catastrophic exposure | Major exposure | Moderate exposure | Minimal exposure |
| Work Stoppage | Full; all work has ceased | Significant; most work has ceased | Some; some work has ceased | Minor; little work has ceased |
| % of End Users | 75 – 100% | 30 – 75% | 15 – 30% | 0 – 15% |
| Workaround | None / unacceptable | Semi-acceptable; short term | Acceptable; medium term | Acceptable; medium term |
| Communication Frequency | Every 30 minutes | Every 2 hours | Daily updates | Updates on resolution |
| Response Time | 15 minutes or less | 1 hour or less | 4 hours or less | 1 business day or less |
| Resolution Time | 8 hours or less | 24 hours or less | 3 business days or less | 5 business days or less |
Response time means an engineer actively working on your ticket — not an automated acknowledgement. Resolution time is measured from first response. Severity 1 and 2 SLAs apply 24/7 for clients on the Secure tier with MDR. All other SLAs apply during business hours (Mon-Fri 7:45am-6pm, Sat 10am-1pm).
Uptime Commitments
For infrastructure we directly manage, we commit to the following availability targets:
Uptime commitments cover infrastructure under our direct management. Third-party cloud services such as Microsoft 365 are governed by their own SLAs from the vendor. We monitor these services and respond to incidents, but cannot contractually guarantee uptime on systems we don't operate.
Helpdesk Performance Commitments
Beyond response and resolution times, we commit to the following operational performance standards:
Onsite Response
For clients within our primary coverage area (Hertfordshire, Essex, and Greater London), we commit to onsite response times when remote resolution is not possible:
Onsite visits are included in your monthly fee with no travel charges within our primary coverage area. For sites outside this area, we'll agree onsite response times during onboarding and bill any travel transparently — with rates agreed in writing before any visit.
Security Incident Response
For clients on the Secure tier with Huntress MDR and Petra ITDR, security incidents are handled separately from general support tickets and have their own SLA:
Huntress MDR provides 24/7 SOC monitoring with active human-led threat response. Petra ITDR provides 24/7 monitoring of identity-layer threats. Both services run continuously, including weekends and bank holidays.
Reporting and Reviews
We commit to the following reporting cadence:
We report SLA compliance as a percentage — not as "average response times". The percentage shows how often we hit our contractual commitments, which is what matters.
Service Credits
Service credits are financial penalties applied to your monthly fee when we miss our SLA commitments. They are the contractual mechanism that ensures our SLAs have meaning beyond marketing.
Credits are applied automatically — you don't need to claim them. They appear as a deduction on your next invoice.
Service credits are subject to a maximum monthly cap of 50% of the affected month's fee. Force majeure events (third-party outages outside our control, government-mandated shutdowns, etc.) are excluded — but we'll always communicate transparently about what happened and why.
What's Not Covered by Our SLAs
Honest providers are clear about what their SLAs do and don't cover. Ours don't apply to:
Where an issue is caused by something outside our control, we will always communicate clearly, work to resolve or escalate appropriately, and never use "not covered" as a reason to avoid helping. The list above defines where SLA credits don't automatically apply — not where we stop trying.
How We Track and Prove SLA Performance
Every ticket logged with our helpdesk is timestamped at every stage: creation, first response, status changes, and resolution. SLA compliance is calculated automatically and visible to you in real time via the customer portal.
We publish anonymised aggregate SLA compliance figures in our monthly service reports. If you want to verify our claims before signing a contract, ask during the sales process — we're happy to share recent compliance figures with prospective clients under NDA.
SLA Review and Updates
We review our SLAs annually and may update them based on operational performance, technology changes, and feedback from clients. Any changes that reduce SLA commitments require 60 days written notice and give you the right to terminate without penalty if the new commitments don't meet your needs. Improvements to SLAs apply immediately.
The current SLA was last updated 8 May 2026.
Have questions about our SLAs?
We're happy to walk through any aspect of these commitments before you sign a contract — or to discuss bespoke SLA terms for businesses with specific compliance or operational requirements.
Read: How to Evaluate an IT Provider's SLAs