Skip the "Greetings," "Salutations," "Dear sir/madam." These are far too stuffy and robotic. Instead, start off your response with a simple "Hi" or Hello."
Hi there. I’m out of the office until Monday, 14 August, with limited access to email.
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Honest communication, even in the form of an email auto reply, is a roadmap. It helps people understand how best to help you and, in turn, allows them to better help themselves. Straightforward expectation setting is a way to be respectful of your coworkers’ time and pressures, but most importantly, it’s a way to be respectful of and guard your time. Even if you don’t feel an intense need to be more open in your workplace correspondence, consider modeling the behavior for others who work with you or, especially, those who work for you. It’s a small change in behavior but it’s a meaningful one. And this summer is the perfect time to start.
This holiday out-of-office email is definitely on theme, if not a little passive aggressive. If you’re getting emails during the holidays, why not treat everything you receive that season like the present it is, and send a thank you note?
Automated reply messages are predefined responses used to communicate with customers across specific scenarios and keep information transparent. It helps customers to understand what is actually happening – whether your agents are busy, out of the office, or on holidays.
I’ll be at a work off-site and will have limited availability by phone and email until ___, please contact ___ for immediate needs about ____ otherwise I will respond as soon as possible”
If your auto reply messages give customers the ‘what next’ picture it will make customers feel that you as a brand can visualize their problem by putting in their shoes.
I haven’t set up an OOO message since I got my first smartphone. My usual method is to glance at an incoming work email and forward it to the appropriate person, or maybe write a one-liner response saying I’m out and will answer next week.
Here's a million-dollar question: how do you get people to do what you want them to? That's where Calls-to-Action (CTAs) come in.
I am out of the office on leave and will return on September 25. Please contact Jean Awad at [email protected] in my absence.
Apologies, but I’m currently knee-deep in sushi and shrines on the other side of the world in Japan. I will be back to the usual tea and crumpets when I return to the office on Tuesday 30th May.
If you need any help, I'm sure that contacting anyone else in the company will also be a waste of time.
Professionally, I just try to be as boring as humanly possible, except in comments embedded in code.
There was a lot of pushback on this, discussion about how big a risk was that really anyway, people saying that John could word his out of office in such a way that people didn’t have to know he was actually away, and if something really was an emergency people would like to know that they have the opportunity to “direct queries to Sam or Dean” so they could be actioned, or make the judgement call that something could wait for John to return.
The following examples and text ideas can be used for almost any kind of holiday / vacation messages. You can switch the language of the text blocks by pressing the tab button.
We have some field staff who have out of office replies set up for when they do fieldwork. On one hand it’s nice I guess, but on the other hand, they aren’t dealing with urgent matters only they can handle (they don’t manage projects or deal with clients), so it seems a bit unnecessary? No one has been disciplined for not responding to an email the same day. But maybe I’m just a crabby Gen-Xer, and a client can stand to wait a few hours or until the next day to get an answer from me.
Meanwhile, I do sometimes put up long ones when I will be away for some days during a season in which there are a confluence of three or four very likely reasons someone would contact me, and who else they need to contact isn’t the same. Like, it’s high llama grooming season, and generally during this month I get two or three requests per week for each of llama bleaching (for which my backup is Stella), llama shaving (for which it’s Arturo), and llama perming (for which it’s Carter). My message says I’ll be out until blah blah, and if it’s not an urgent llama grooming issue, I’ll get back to you after that, but meanwhile, for urgent llama grooming here’s who to call.