Amanda works at HubSpot, and she came with a unique auto respondent that asked her contacts to guess where she is. To give background, she flew down to Boston to attend a Red Sox training game in the spring with her father. She chose to ask her contacts whether where they think she might be, and also this played some wonderful use of litotes here:
That message was definitely too long, and while I see it was meant to be funny/snarky, I can see where it would be grating / easy to misinterpret.
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Imagine if you contacted a business for support and have not heard back from them for a few days. Isn’t it a frustrating situation? This is one of the common scenarios many customers face as businesses fail to understand problems by putting themselves in clients’ shoes.
Given free rein, I’d absolutely love to tell people that needing me to show them how to do X in Excel is actually not a vacation-interrupting emergency and there are tons of free videos that would explain that, if they did not want to contact the actual departments who handle tech support and training. Or that this project they’ve known about for a month but decided to keep under their hat until it became an emergency is something they’ll need to resolve themselves. But that would not fly at all.
2. Include a GIF to make your auto-response more fun. Everyone can appreciate the excitement of pushing work aside to go on vacation. Bring this to life by linking to a GIF in your vacation responder message. Here’s an example out of office reply: Shoot, you just missed me.
To my mind, it’s just a really bad idea to mass delete stuff that comes in while you’re out. You never know if those emails contain important (though non-actionable) information that you’ll need. You really can’t expect people to resend information like that once you’re back, especially if you were cc’d on something.
World War I – known at the time as “The Great War” - officially ended when the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, in the Palace of Versailles outside the town of Versailles, France. However, fighting ceased seven months earlier when an armistice, or temporary cessation of hostilities, between the Allied nations and Germany went into effect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. For that reason, November 11, 1918, is generally regarded as the end of “the war to end all wars.”
We are closed today for the [public holiday name]. Our office will re-open tomorrow at am.
Setting a proper out-of-office email also puts pressure off you when you have limited time to respond to emails outside the office. We will look at a few examples together here:
Success is a Choice 25 Best Elevator Pitch Examples for Startups and Entrepreneurs 21 Best SMART Goals for Project Managers 25 Leadership SMART Goals Examples for Managers and Employees Force Field Analysis Explained with Examples Monroe’s Motivated Sequence Explained [with Examples] 21 Best SMART Goals Examples for Teachers and Educators The 5 P’s of Marketing Explained with Examples 21 Best Active Listening Exercises with Examples 25 Professional SMART Goals Examples for Work Porter’s Five Forces Model Explained (w/ Examples of Competition Analysis)
10. Office Closed for Annual Vacation. Use this template for your annual year-end vacation. Hi (specify the Name field id), I am out of the office for my annual year-end vacation and will not be able to check my mail until after the New Year.
Informal approach helps your clients think of you as of a human being. This alleviates some of the annoyance they may feel because of not receiving a proper reply. Generally, making people laugh is a great way to make people remember you. Do that and your clients won’t switch to a competitor.
Note: For Outlook 2007, to turn off out-of-office replies, select Tools > Out of Office Assistant and uncheck the Send Out of Office auto-replies checkbox.
Other than that, I keep it simple like most folks here, but back in my younger days I had one that started something like “I am out of the office on vacation until (date). I will not be checking emails, voicemails, (work queue system), or generally thinking about this place at all…”
If that’s truly what you intend, great. But if not, you may want to take a deep breath and try this: “I am currently on vacation and not accepting emails. Please contact x for any issues while I’m away.” This approach is refreshingly honest and clear. And as long as you’re comfortable with the competence and availability of your back-up contact, you shouldn’t feel funny or guilty about going this route at all.
My immediate team does this with calendar invites for our scheduled PTO (set to “Show As Free”), and I actually find it really helpful. I certainly wouldn’t want to get an email from dozens of people that I may or may not need to get in touch with, but if I am quickly looking at my calendar to set up time with my team, it’s helpful to have a reminder of who is out and who is not. I definitely wouldn’t remember if my teammates sent an email or a chat. I’ll invite relevant coworkers to an event called “Applesauced on PTO” that shows up as free on their calendar, and make a separate event for myself to be marked out of office in the system
That’s my practice, too, though I only use it for times I’ll be out for a day or more. Some of the work I do and support can be very time sensitive and it’s really the most efficient use of *everyone’s* time if I spend two minutes before I leave setting up OOO so that they are quickly directed to the right person instead of having to go check my calendar, see I’m out for a week, try to remember who it is that’s my backup, etc.