An out of office message is a compact text that conveys the most important facts: How long you’ll be unreachable, when your contacts can expect an answer, (optionally) the reason for the absence, and, if necessary, a personal note. A referral to another email address, e.g. to one of your colleagues, is often helpful or even necessary.
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For comparison my current (not great) boss sent an out of office recently detailing how he would be out because he was on his personal sail boat all day, sailing from vacation destination X back to our port city. At length. In a pandemic. When we all had our wages frozen at the start of the crisis.
I would be SUPER annoyed to get this! I agree it seems condescending and it’s just too long.
Seriously, literally, anything but a voicemail. I’d take “sharpie on a dirty napkin delivered by carrier pigeon to my island vacation” over voicemails. I can’t flag voicemails for later. And also, we have this cool new feature where you can see missed calls. I do not need a voicemail just saying “Hey its Bob, call me back.”
Unfortunately, I will not be able/ delayed in answering your e-mail till 23rd Nov.
If one were concerned about the message rubbing people the wrong way, it’s certainly something that can work with a bit of rephrasing: “I’m out on leave from X to Y. All messages received during that time will be deleted. Please resend your request after Y, or else contact Z for urgent assistance.”
Front makes it easy to save vacation responders and turn them on and off. If you're not on Front (yet!) here's how to save one in Gmail or Outlook. Then just copy your message into your vacation responder, rest assured your emails will get a response, and hit that glorious "Sign out" button.
You’re finally taking some time off of work. Sure, your holidays this year won’t be spent sunning in the tropics or scaling an ice-capped mountain as you might have hoped, but you’ve got big plans for taking some down time to rest, relax, and binge new shows on your favorite streaming service.
Hello and thank you for calling, [Company Name], where [state your short company slogan]. If you know the extension of the party you are trying to reach, you may dial it at any time. To speak with a Sales representative, press 1. To reach a Customer Support agent, press 2. To reach our Billing department, press 3. If you would like to know our regular business hours and location, press 4. If you would like to speak with an Operator, press 0, or press 9 to repeat the available options. 2. Basic Customer Inquiry
An automatic response should include the date when you left, a reason (vacation, sick leave, a conference, etc) and, if possible, the date when you plan to come back. Thank your client for their email, promise to get back to it as soon as possible and apologize for the inconvenience. Also, it should be obvious that you’re out of office from the first sentence.
Please be informed, I am in a workshop and would be having no/limited access to emails. I will be back in the office on 9th-October-2020 and will do my best to respond promptly to your email when I return.
The auto reply only allows you to choose between ‘No-one, Recents, Favourite, All Contacts’. I need it to reply to everyone. Is there a way of doing this?
I am currently out of the store on holidays.We will get back to work on (insert date). If there is something urgent, you can inform me by sending me an email me with the “URGENT” reference in its title and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Before I implemented this system, I got *way* too many calls asking if so-and-so was out of the office that day when an OOO tells them that Bob will be back in three hours and to call Sue in the interim. The OOOs have reduced status check calls to practically zero, and the OOO preview pops up in our system as soon someone’s email is entered.
This is something I recommend doing only after you understand the dynamics of your workplace and your clientele. If it falls under the “okay” category, this unapologetically real out of office email can be a talking point when you return to your cubicle. It’s a short, simple, and sweet yet savage email. You can tweak the wording to write a bit of a diplomatic message based on your organization.