This is one reason I rarely give a contact person. My company is terrible at communication, and not only could you easily be sent on a OOO chain, you could also be emailing someone who is out who didn’t even use OOO.
I’d add a little more detail to your message just to make it clear what will happen in your inbox. “If I don’t hear otherwise, I’ll assume that your issue was handled by my colleague” or “Please cc me if you contact Jane, and I’ll check back in on my return if I think your issue is still open.”
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I had a friend in high school whose voicemail was him singing that song. However, I didn’t have cable at the time (living in a rural area in the early 2000s) and didn’t get the reference. I thought he was soooo clever!
Of course that all depends on if you have employees, etc., but i’ve seen those dynamics recently and think it’s interesting to see who someone leaves as their OOO contact. What do you guys think? Am I reading too much into it?
When customers receive automated messages, they have expectations about the wait duration (in terms of number for e.g. 4 mins or 4th position), that can make or break their customer service experience.
Hahahahaha, reminds me of the time the entire giant department (hundreds of people) had to sit through a SLIDE SHOW of a higher up’s trip to Europe, in person. They sent a survey afterwards–thankfully anonymous–and I said it was extremely inappropriate to make us sit through his holiday snaps when most of us can’t go on vacation at all and it was supposed to be a WORK meeting.
Erin Ollila is a content strategist and writer who believes in the power of words and how a message can inform — and even transform — its intended audience. Reach out to her on Instagram at @ErinOllila, or visit her website erinollila.com.
Under “General,” scroll down to the “Vacation responder” section. Fill in your message and subject line and select the dates you’d like it to appear, then select “Vacation responder on” and then “Save Changes” to finish.
For those of you arguing that entrepreneurs and salespeople must always be available, I present to you Exhibit A. While this is specific to Yesware (and you should check out their other OOO examples), it's easy enough to tweak to fit your industry.
Yeah, announcing you were going to delete emails unread and expecting the sender to resend when you return would NEVER fly in my office. I’d get executive complaints about that, especially if it went to a client or outside party – if a client can’t reach you, they will reach out to someone else who may not work at your organization and you lose business. I feel like this delete-it-all philosophy would only work for an entirely internal role where timelines are more relaxed, and even then, I feel it’s a bit unprofessional to foist your own catch-up work onto others, especially if they’ve been backfilling for you while you were OOO.
Education Details: If you are planning to head out on vacation or step away from your office for a few days- creating an out of office autoresponder email message is … out of the office email template
Several of my coworkers still have page-long “Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, our department will be…” auto-replies set up 24/7, even though the basic function of our office has barely changed. I’m currently working odd part time hours right now, and if there weren’t so many of these annoying emails going around, I’d have one that clarifies my email timelines, but I don’t want to be another spammer.
She may want to talk to her IT folks to see if they can help her switch this around.
Hi, I’m out of the office. Thank you for getting in touch. We’ll get back to you within 8 business hours.
If it’s anything less than a business day, it just becomes this extra beacon of our completely toxic and out of whack work culture that insists we be reachable every second.
I don’t know what to say these days – I’m still working from home so “out of the office” doesn’t sound right any more, but ‘off work’ seems like too much? I’m probably way overthinking it but I’ve felt stuck every time I need to write one lately.
1) Communicate when a person will be back, or if they are out for an indeterminate period of time, tell me who I should be contacting instead 2) Communicate what I should expect. (For example, when I do my monthly reports, I have an out of office message that says that I’ll be slow to respond. I *will* actually check my email at least a couple of times, but I generally won’t respond to anything non-urgent.) 3) If the person is in a job that handles urgent requests, list who I need to contact instead if it can’t wait until they get back.