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Q. Will Supply Chain, Purchasing, Receiving, Mail Services and other such departments be open during winter break?
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A thing my employer does is when someone leaves, they just shutoff the email. So someone goes to the trouble of writing an out of office explaining that they have retired or accepted a job somewhere else and where someone can go for help and IT just nukes the email address 24 hours after the person leaves. Then whomever was contacting them has no idea where to turn next. It is a terrible policy.
We log in to the voicemail account and simply activate any of the 4 greetings. With our Cisco VoIP system, I am able to create a Standard, Alternate, Closing and Holiday greeting, however, I can only activate/use the Standard or Alternate Greeting during business hours. I can only activate the Closed or Holiday during specific times.
> When I get an answer from someone who reads his e-mails on vacation I’m pleasantly surprised.
LOL if I got the math/physics one I’d do the small amount of work to just to call them.
70% of local searches online result in a phone call; In 2014, 80% of callers sent to voicemail said they do not leave messages because they don’t think they’ll even be heard. If you want your voicemail greeting to work for you and not against you, it’s …
My dad will call and leave — legit — a 5 minute voice mail where he will tell me that he has something to tell me, that it is really funny, that he can’t leave it as a voicemail because I won’t get it, or maybe I won’t find it funny, that’s fine, I don’t have to call him back, it was stupid anyway, it probably isn’t funny….. He goes through all of the stages of passive aggressive behavior before ending with “Anyway, call me back.”
The email I send out always says something along the lines of “I’ll be away Thursday and Friday, so if you need anything from me, please let me know before noon on Wednesday. Thanks!”
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Huh. This is a rare column from you that I disagree with almost entirely. I guess to start with what I think you get right, there's no need to apologize for being out of office, and no one should feel obligated to deal with anything other than a legitimate emergency (which are, in most fields, truly rare) while on vacation or while taking time off.
On a serious note… sailing vacations are the best for no access/contact vacations. I heartily endorse them!
Now that you know what you should and shouldn’t include, how do you go about crafting the perfect out-of-office vacation message?
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].
In my absence for pre-sales support services, you can drop an email at [email protected] or reach out to (YOUR COLLEAGUE’SNAME)/[email protected]
Think about your tone and mood - you don't know who'll be getting these out of office auto reply emails so be mindful of the impression you make. Think of the boss, the CEO, a colleague you like, family members, clients you like. That said, there are some bridge-burner examples below to tempt you!
When one of my colleagues is out of the office, he doesn’t mess around. In fact, he’s turned his auto-responses into a running series of commentary from fictional cartoon character Troy McClure.