In my office, most of the phone lines just didn’t even have voicemail, because we already got enough abuse in regular phone calls (university parking office). When we switched to VOIP, that went away, but at least now they get *badly* transcribed into our email boxes…
My snarky colleague sure did in his out-of-office message below. We send thank-you letters in response to holiday gifts, so it's only natural to expect the same gesture in our work inboxes …
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I set my OoO for individual public holidays, because I know they’re not global, and I get emails from lots of different countries.
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Agreed! A bit of warmth is fine, sure, but it’s not the place for chattiness — that’s for talking to an actual person. I want an OOO message to tell me that the person is out, when they’ll be back, and who I should contact in the meantime if need be. No objections to multiple options there, whether it’s “X for llama grooming issues and Y for llama tea parties” or “X for routine questions, Y if it’s urgent, Z if it’s an emergency,” but I want to be able to absorb the useful info quickly and move on.
Thank you for your message. I am out of the office from May 1-6 with limited email access. If you need immediate assistance, please contact my assistant editor, Alex Jordan, at [email protected] or 555-432-6100. Otherwise, I will respond to messages upon my return.
You may not think it, but an auto-attendant is an important part of your business. It is typically the first point of contact with your customers, as they will call your main number with sales inquiries, troubleshooting questions, etc.
I can’t remember if this was just an outgoing voice message before routing you to an individual, or for a voicemail, but I remember a fun December phone message from a small company (I think an insurance agency) sung to the tune of a Christmas carol–something like Jingle Bells. The content was something like: you’ve reached our office during this holiday season, hope your holidays are happy, please 1) leave a message or 2) press X for who you want. Other than the tune, it wasn’t overly holiday-centric (for those who don’t celebrate the holidays) and it was cute.
I’ve started using one that’s short/sweet but still has a little bit of JAZZ. I can’t take credit for it – I saw it on Twitter a few years ago. It’s been received well both inside and outside of my organization. Here it is. If it speaks to you, please yoink it and use it as you wish:
An old boss had a pet peeve about this so I became very conscious of making sure that I listed out who to contact on what day… before the group email. So it looked something like this:
If your message requires a response faster than that, please email my manager at [email protected].
Exactly. It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting on the beach, on my couch, or in a hospital bed–I’m not reachable and you’re gonna have to wait until I get back or contact someone else.
If you work with regular clients, then you may want to send holiday messages to clients to help maintain these important relationships. Reminding clients that you are there for them through these brief messages can go a long way to creating goodwill with these pivotal connections.
What Should Your Vacation Message Include?A subject, with the dates you leave and returnWho to contact in an emergency (name, email, and phone number)Point of contact for non-urgent inquiries (name, email, and phone number)Keep Your Message Professional
6. Maternity leave out of office template. Taking maternal leave, and indeed any parental leave, often means more time off work than standard annual leave.
I am not able to set OOO messages at all. Most of the people who are contacting me do so through custom aliases that then come to our team, who each handles specifics. Even if I’m out someone else is available, but I can’t know who is supposed to handle that specific email to be able to redirect without naming everyone, and then confusing things more when Client A gets the same reply as Client B but one needs to go to teammate C and the other to teammates D & E. Then to make just that bit more complicated, there are the clients who think that going around the system to email the teammates directly at our personal email addresses is better but pitch a hissy when we’re OOO but they didn’t get a notice? I just set rules to forward those.