A clear, thoughtful out of office message saves the caller from troubles and inconvenience caused by your unavailability as they know what they should do next. Such a system avoids the negative impact that could come from the inability to respond to calls and messages. Your clients would likely try and contact you again and again, getting frustrated and losing trust in your business.
I struggle with naming a contact too. My current job doesn’t really have emergencies, so while my second in command could handle stuff I normally would, should she have to? Also, 98% of the people that would get my OOO would know who to go to anyway if they actually needed something urgent. I hate to make someone else’s life harder for my own convenience when it’s not even needed.
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Setting your out of office may be different depending on the email provider you use. But whether you’re on Outlook, Gmail, or another platform, it should be a relatively straightforward process.
It’s your last day before the vacation starts, you are rushing through your to-do list and suddenly you realize- I need to write an OOO email!
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.
She’s been with our org for 32 years, haha. And our departmental email policy for the last at least eight of them has been “check your email at least twice a day.” Definitely no expectations of a 15 minute turnaround.
And while it may seem like a simple thing, if your out-of-office message is unclear or incomplete, it can cause problems while you’re out and when you return.
If you know that you’re going to be out of office for a long time, it’s worth thinking about redirecting your clients to your colleague. Mention their name, explain what position they occupy and how they can help your client. Include a way to contact them in the form of an email address or a phone number. Just try to warn a colleague that you want to redirect your clients to them before going on a vacation.
At my old job, you used to nominate a contact for when you were out of the office and there wasn’t an obvious person to contact. One department was so small that they all just put the all team email so they never had to change it. Trouble is, it turns out Outlook team emails by default only accept internal messages :X
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Most people don’t give this a second thought, but you could potentially be putting your company at serious risk. In the wrong hands this information can open the door for phishing attacks and financial fraud.
While injecting a little humor into your vacation email message can sometimes be a good idea – depending on your company and contacts – avoid oversharing and keep it professional at all times.
Click on Preferences from the pop-up menu and click on the Vacation tab to continue. On the vacation tab, you have the option to set your vacation period and the automatic response.
I am out of the office on leave and will return on September 25. Please contact Jean Awad at [email protected] in my absence.
It makes a positive difference when you create auto reply messages that adhere to the basic elements of personalized messages followed with greetings.
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.
If you have any urgent query about Tyro Magazine before then, please don’t hesitate to contact *** in my absence.