Anything worded like Option 1 would never fly at my workplace, exactly because of this. I have colleagues who complain to upper management if their non-urgent tech support questions (that a whole troubleshooting website already answers) don’t get an answer from me or my boss within half a day. And oh, did I mention our job is not actually tech support?
Brad, You can manually turn on DND to activate Auto Reply, explained in the article.
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Even the most blunt Out Of Office responders can still offer some levity or can at least entertain. If you’re looking to spice up your OOO, try this wonderful Wikipedia OOO generator that Melody Joy Kramer and Alex Hollender built. It auto-generates an OOO response with either a link or a quote pulled from Wikipedia. It’s a cool little project and a nice starter template for you when you decide to tell everyone to buzz off and leave you alone for a bit.
I wonder if anyone ever calculated how much time was wasted producing those messages.
Some of my coworkers have started putting “Thank you for your email” at the beginning of their out of office replies. Management loves it, but I think it’s too ingratiating and I cringe when I read it. These are junior-level staffers, so maybe it makes sense in that context? Anyway, I refuse to put that in my out of office messages.
I had a manager who did exactly that for his paternity leave. I was floored, because I never thought it was an option. His attitude was that if it was important enough, the person would send it again.
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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.
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.
Yup. That’s almost verbatim what I do. It’s the standard around here and now I’m grateful for that!
Education Details: Out of office holiday template. If you’re closing for a few days (or longer) for the holidays, let your clients know. Your out of office holiday auto reply email should be informative and wish your clients all the best during the holiday season. Happy holidays from all of us at …
Others like to take the opportunity to inject a little personality and make the reader smile, like our very own Rachael’s summertime out-of-office:
Q. Who should notify contractors, vendors and other individuals who work with various University departments that their services may not be needed during winter break?
You Need A Better Out Of Office MessageWe don't need professional politeness. We need honesty.
I came across a woman’s Maternity Leave OOO message which said “All emails will be deleted upon my return. If it still urgent after (return date), send another message.”
we had something similar at one phone-heavy place I used to work and it was actually extremely useful – everyone set their voicemail when they got in, and people would include if they were offsite (so worth ringing their mobile) or likely to be otherwise unreachable, and who to contact if your query was urgent. only took a minute to set, and was super useful to me as someone who had to talk to maybe 10-20 people on the phone in a day.
Auto (I mean auto not manual sms send out) sms reply does not work for incoming calls only for messages. I see this issue is getting ignored though pointed out several times. Has anyone cracked this one?