I'm not actually at the North Pole, but I am preoccupied with wrapping presents, drinking hot chocolate, and listening to festive music. Therefore, I won’t respond to your email until [date]. Thank you for your patience, and I hope you have a wonderful holiday.
hi i want to be able to hear calls and alerts while at the same time if my phone is in lock to auto reply. is that possible? to have both?
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The more information you include in your outgoing message about the colleagues who can assist in your absence, the less likely you are to interfere with ongoing projects. This will help ensure you enjoy that well-earned vacation.
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Thanks for your email. Please expect a delay in response due to a medical emergency. In case of urgent queries, please reach out to me on my cell or to my colleague at [email protected].
If you're anything like I am, you probably fall into team two. That doesn't leave a lot of time to get creative. But if you plan ahead, you might be able to craft some hilarity.
I physically recoiled at the thought of my face appearing on a new browser tab. UGH. The pets do say who their humans are (usually just first name) and what the pet’s favourite things are. My phone is now filled with memes and photos of my monitor as I send pet photos to friends.
However, I will be taking periodic breaks from binge-watching everything I’ve missed to check my email [once per day/every evening/occasionally] while I’m away.
Switching between apps to get things done will break the continuum of work. Working on records in the CRM and collaborating on other apps simultaneously ...
I agree that the reasons are not relevant. But at my last company, a coworker had overly short out of office messages. Examples: “out of office today.” Or “out of office until Monday.” With no additional information about coverage, etc. Those always felt overly curt to me and made me wonder, is this person okay? Was this OOO planned or are they on the verge of a mental breakdown? (It was a very toxic culture so this wasn’t out of the question). I would be curious to hear others perspectives on this. Is too little information just as bad?
Every business is unique. There’s no one single best way to tell your clients that you’re not going to be around for the next few days (weeks or months). But there’s also no denying that whatever out of office message you use right now, you could always improve it.
The big issue I have with the example in the post is that not only is it unnecessarily long-winded, but you have to listen through all the chattiness to get to the “here’s who to contact in a real emergency” part. The tone does rub me wrong, but I’m willing to roll with that as a personality/company culture thing.
If it’s not that infinite loop of autoreply hell, you get the “I will not be reading or responding to any email sent during this time. Please resend your request after August 1st.” dismissal.
The idea for this one is to pick your favourite Christmas carol and repurpose it for your out-of-office response. It’s festive and sure to get a laugh! (Whatever you do, just don’t pick Baby It’s Cold Outside).
A clear, thoughtful out of office message saves the caller from troubles and inconvenience caused by your unavailability as they know what they should do next. Such a system avoids the negative impact that could come from the inability to respond to calls and messages. Your clients would likely try and contact you again and again, getting frustrated and losing trust in your business.
Voice mail is a strictly worse medium than almost any alternative. You don’t get the opportunity to converse and ask questions back and forth like you do with a phone call; you can’t extract information efficiently from the message like you can with an email (the old “ugh, I have to listen to this entire message over again just to check one thing he said at the end” scenario).
Inform your correspondent about the date by which they can expect to receive a response to the email they send you during the holiday season. Indication that your will reply to the email when they return.