[Tweet: “Are you going on holiday? Learn the best tips for writing your next out-of-office auto-reply email in English.”]
Come Christmas time, there’s nothing quite like tidying up your desk, shamefully closing your 50 Chrome tabs, and switching on your out-of-office responder for the holidays.
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This is what I’ve seen most often in my career. Problem is, the contact is almost always the admin. I’m the admin. Everyone’s idea of assistance is different. Often, I didn’t have the knowledge about the issue in order to be of any assistance. I wound up spending more time running around looking for answers than actually working on what was on my own plate. It’s exhausting. Otherwise known as “please don’t call us for unicorn problems when we handle llamas. Literally, we can’t do anything for unicorn problems.”
I’ve only seen it used for certain roles – usually admin-type ones – where people are fielding a significant amount of requests, so the potential vacation backlog could become prohibative and discourage people from taking time off.
Go a long way to set up an out of office message in a plain and funny way. Use a little humor to build the rappo with the clients and develop the relationship between the customers and employees and direct the eyes of the clients.
Hi, I am currently out of the office. I know I’m supposed to say that I’ll have limited access to email and won’t be able to respond until I return, but that’s not true. My phone will be with me and I can respond if I need to. However, I promised my family I would try to relax.
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But I'm someone who has co-workers in almost every time zone, on almost every continent, and in almost every geographic region, and I simply can't imagine using most of these examples with co-workers in, say, South Korea or Japan or Nicaragua. Like, the account manager who reaches out to me for help accessing a particular system in Seoul doesn't need my personal story about why I'm taking time off and all the fun (or, for that matter, not fun) things that I'll be doing — they need help gaining access to [system] in order to complete the job tasks that have been assigned to them. If I am not available to help them, they need to know who can, and if there just *isn't* anyone else who can perform this task, they need to know when I will be able to.
When one of my colleagues went on vacation, he sent an out-of-office message that was both clever and smart. First, he sent the recipient on an imaginary scavenger hunt to “the highest peak of the tallest mountain.” He used humorous absurdity to make it clear that he would not be checking email while he was away.
6.( مرحبا بكم في .John Doe خطنا الهاتفي الساخن متاح خلال فترة الاعياد. مواعيد العمل ويمكن الاطلاع على موقعنا على doe.de. www.john نشكركم على ثقتكم ونتمنى لكم وأحبائك أعيادا سعيدة وسنة جديدة سعيدة.
We had to do this at my prior position so that agents knew that we were in the office that specific day. Now i dont even use my phone as most internal people call me on Teams.
I’ve heard “please respond at *your* earliest convenience,” but never the other way around.
There is simply no better way to engage your clients about different aspects of your brand other than using an auto-text to sufficiently keep them on the know.
Come Christmas time, there’s nothing quite like tidying up your desk, shamefully closing your 50 Chrome tabs, and switching on your out-of-office responder for the holidays.
If you’re an events-based business, use your out of office auto-reply as a way to promote your upcoming conferences, sessions, and speakers! Jason here, thanks for reaching out to ThinkTank! I’m currently at a speaking event in Chicago. Find out if I’ll be coming to your city here https://txt.st/PQB
The Management Office will be closed on [date] for [Holiday Name]. Any inconvenience caused is much regretted.
What makes this a decent example of an OOO message is that it’s candid, (hopefully) honest, and blunt. There’s no guessing whether or not this dude is going to respond to your email this week. Also, it gives us a bit of an insight into his life right now, which helps communication in the moment and in the future. He’s burned out. Even if you did manage to reach him, it’s likely he’d be resentful, even if he didn’t say so. There’s a good chance the sender of the original email will identify with this and respect his time.