For comparison my current (not great) boss sent an out of office recently detailing how he would be out because he was on his personal sail boat all day, sailing from vacation destination X back to our port city. At length. In a pandemic. When we all had our wages frozen at the start of the crisis.
But I’ve also seen this tactic used for a week’s vacation, which seems… aggressive.
.
Once I come back on *date*, I will get back to you. Maybe I can even tell you about my adventures.
Thank you for your email, I’m currently out of the office and celebrating the holidays until [insert date]. For immediate assistance, please contact [insert name] at [insert email] and one of Santa’s helpers will assist you!
The eternally mind-blowing story of the company-wide email, OoO messages, and reply-all autoresponders that took out a 30,000 employee university email server one summer, comes to mind here…
I am currently on my annual leave and will return to the office on *date*. If your request is urgent, please contact my colleague *name* at *email* or *phone*.
I’ve seen those before (also for maternity or for people who were taking extended leave). I really appreciate it, personally — it basically lets the sender know that the ball IS still in their court, which I don’t see as inherently offensive or attitudy.
9 scripts for holiday voicemail greetings. Below we have listed several ideas for great voicemail messages, depending on your company’s needs. 1. Happy [X holiday]! You’ve reached [ company’s name]. We are closed from [X date] till [X date] for the celebration of [X holiday].
Every customer interaction is important to showcase your brand personality and auto reply messages are no different. Hence, you need to make the right use of every opportunity and convert it into a good experience. Automated reply messages help you to provide great customer experience and also sets the right expectation.
In the normal times, my friends and I used to do “Crawl 4 Cancer” which is a bar crawl (aka debauchery day) where all proceeds go to cancer research. It’s great! But…yEEah, we’re not crawling FOR cancer…we’re very much against it! We laugh about it every year and the jokes never get old.
Merry Christmas.Happy Hanukkah.Joyous Kwanzaa.Yuletide Greetings.Happy holidays.Joyeux Noël.Feliz Navidad.Seasons Greetings.
An out of office email is an automatic response you can set up to be sent when someone tries to get in touch with you whilst you’re away from the office.
Don’t forget our office and Contact Centre will be closed tomorrow; [date], for the public holiday. You can still use our internet banking, mobile app and phone banking during this time.
Same, I think it’s patronizing to talk people through their options as if they can’t make a decent choice without having their hand held every step of the way. There are plenty of people who can’t, of course, but I don’t think a long, verbose message is necessarily going to help.
But despite these (fantastic) suggestions, the number one rule for choosing your out of office is that it reflects who you are as a person. Don’t change for anyone, especially not your auto-responder.
It makes a positive difference when you create auto reply messages that adhere to the basic elements of personalized messages followed with greetings.
If instead you ask your co-workers to cc or bcc on replies then you will know which have been dealt with. (I think for internal mails it’s more reasonable to ask that if the original person contacts someone else, they cc you so you know who is dealing – and in smaller organisations where people know you personally you could also send a mail round the day before you leave to say you’re going to be out and to ask that any enquiries are directed to [name]in your absence, to try to avoid them coming into your inbox in the first place.