Hello, I’m away for the weekend. Back on Wednesday. I’m in [COUNTRY] drinking coffee. Eating lots of food. Should have internet on the evenings to answer the important emails. Please send photos of penguins to Twitter @[HANDLE] to alert me that you’ve sent an email. This is most important.
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.”
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Remember that it’s important to choose the tone of your message based on the final recipient.
There’s nothing awful or offensive about this message, but it’s also not very good. Yes, it provides the courtesy of letting the sender nominally know that you’re going to be slower than usual to respond. That’s nice. The problem is in this bit: “may be slow to respond to email.” Another popular variation: “might be slower than usual to respond.”
Of course, very few people would be so pushy as to send you a private message about a business issue while you’re on holiday. Still, the odds are that you’ll amplify your social media reach and gain some new followers by including links to your social media in an OOO message.
“When I got there and found out the bungee was 134 feet high I got terrible cold feet, but I felt that since I wrote it, I had to do it. So I did. It was terrifying and indeed a lesson on making bold claims in a public way!”
If you super, duper need to contact me, you can find me on Facebook or Twitter and use the hashtag #I’mGonnaRuinYourVacation
If you do not resend your email to the appropriate person as outlined above, it will not be read. I am not checking email during this time, and my emails are not being forwarded to someone else to check, either. Please also understand that it will take me some time to respond to you once I am back.
There is no built-in auto reply-feature in iOS to set out off office message for iPhone to auto-reply for text and calls. Auto-reply on Text message on iPhone is an essential feature that is useful when you go for a vacation or out of station for a while. However, there is a workaround to set auto-reply text messages on the iPhone for calls and texts. This will work all the time and send iMessage auto-reply for incoming calls and text messages to your iPhone.
Over Twitter DMs, one woman sent me her OOO messages from when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The messages — composed while she was undergoing chemotherapy treatments and recovering from surgery — were detailed and unique. They offered touches of humor, honesty, details about her treatment schedules and set expectations for others trying to reach her. She offered alternative contact options for potential emailers to make sure urgent requests didn’t fall through the cracks but offered a dose or reality as well. I particularly appreciated this line:
Thanks for your message. I am out of the office today and have limited access to email. If you need immediate assistance, please contact [Name] at [phone number], or you can try me on my cell phone at [phone number].
Thankfully, with a simple out of office message taking a day off doesn’t mean that your communication with clients has to stop.
If you need super-urgent assistance, you are more than welcome to parachute onto the island and meet me on the beach! If that isn’t possible, please contact Jane Smith at [email protected] or 971-314-6323.
It got bad enough that others began begging someone to cull the list. Reply all, of course (thankfully it didn’t turn into an explosion of replies all). Someone finally did remove the email from the list.
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But the bottom line is, unplug as much as you possibly can. You’ll get more benefit from your time away and return relaxed, recharged and ready to take on the New Year with extra energy.
Your clients don’t have a lot of time, and neither do you. Use the following short voicemail greetings to get to the point quickly and invite them to leave a message.