Naturally, you want to help your clients and other business associates to contact you in the best and easiest way possible. For that to happen, you should provide out of office messages when you are not available.
Out of office messages are usually handed to managers, employees, or coworkers as a means of notifying them about your short.
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Before you trade your office pass for a YouTrip card, you’d need to first power through your to-do list and prepare a super swee handover for your team. Then all is good, right? Not quite. You don’t have the right to exclaim “pang gang oh” and disconnect from work just yet 🙅
Start by recognizing your backup contacts for the time when you are out of the office. Make sure that, when needed, they can be available to help customers instead of you. Meeting with your co-workers and making everything clear should be one of your top priorities. The person who covers you while you are gone should not find that out by receiving an email out of nowhere. Be professional and plan everything properly — you are about to take a break, after all.
I think I started following that Tiktok account after this video and, if I recall correctly, the OOO writer is an SVP who is trying to reset a company culture that has very little work/life balance. I always liked it, but that background info made me love it that much more.
Does your company publish blogs or offer downloadable ebooks, reports, or case studies? If so, add a P.S. to the end of your vacation message linking your readers to some content they can learn from or engage with.
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Completely agree. I have also recently have seen multiple out of office messages that say something along the lines of, “Please be aware that I may be slow to respond to emails today.” If it’s that time-sensitive, why is it an email? Asynchronous communication tools shouldn’t be smashed into the roles of real-time ones, and vice versa.
THANK YOU!!!!!! As a small business owner, I have struggled with any out of office time, weekends, and after hours. Clients seem to text more often than email these days, and there hasn’t been a way to inform them with “out of office reply”. This article helps me tremendously! Also, there should be more built into our phones for texting like email: read, mark as unread, and prioritize contacts of different rows or colors indicating favorites, contacts, and non-contacts (pesky customers who bombard you afterhours).
I’ve named the conference I was attending a couple of times in my out of office. That particular conference is a big enough deal in my field that some of the people emailing me were probably also in attendance, which made it worth specifying, in addition to setting expectations about email response times and overall availability.
Sorry to miss you. I wrapped up everything at the office and am off on vacation until [DAY OF WEEK], [DATE]. Anyway, if your question or favour can wait, great. If not, do me a favour and forward your email to [EMAIL] and you’ll be well-treated. Thanks. (Source: Futureofworking.com)
In conclusion, an eager customer trying his or her best to reach out to you is the last person you want to disappoint. Make their day special with an unexpected or quirky autoresponder email that your customers wouldn’t have thought they’d see in their inbox in a million years.
When you’re trying to contact someone on a matter of importance (or even urgency) on one side of the equation and you find out via an autoresponder that they are away for vacation, it can be incredibly frustrating unless they’ve done the front-end work beforehand. (I’m speaking from personal – and recent – experience here. And worse, there was no auto-responder set up. I had to use the – gasp! – telephone to find out what was going on.)
Hi Steve, thanks for your article. My issue is same as Pam Lamkin, above. In order to use your phone you must turn off “Driving” mode, and then any messages that come in will not get the auto reply as long as you are on your phone, and until you reinstate the driving mode. Any thoughts?
That’s the simple structure of a voicemail greeting. Overall, your greeting should be professional, but the wording can vary depending on the situation. Check out a sample below.
The Management Office will be closed on [date] for [Holiday Name]. Any inconvenience caused is much regretted.