Have you ever called a company’s support line just to be confronted with an unsympathetic and confusing attendant menu? Or tried to reach a representative, but pressing the “0” key does nothing?
Microsoft 365 subscribers can set up automatic replies for when they are out-of-office or unavailable to respond to email.
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Join InHerSight's growing community of professional women and get matched to great jobs and more! Blog Paid Time Off July 17, 2020 How to Write an Out-of-Office Message What’s an out of office message?
What we need in our work communication is not more professional politeness or less formal, chat-based messaging applications like Slack. We need honesty. The problem is that we’ve conditioned ourselves to see honesty as self-indulgent or disrespectful. I’d argue the opposite is true. Honesty, even if it’s a bit more inconvenient for all parties in the moment, pays dividends later. It builds trust. When my partner Anne Helen Petersen and I were interviewing people for our forthcoming book on remote work, a frequent lament from both middle managers and workers was that they didn’t feel like they knew how to succeed in their jobs; that they were guessing what their superiors and coworkers wanted and, even when they asked, they didn’t quite trust the responses they got back.
Not an out of office reply but a voicemail greeting: at a previous job I called someone and her voicemail greeting said that she would be out of the office from Day – Day and that her voicemail wasn’t accepting messages during that time, click! The time in question was six months prior. Plenty of people she worked with and for could have called her on it and apparently had not, so she just … didn’t get voicemails. Like, that was not a way you could communicate with her.
Optionally, complete the fields in the Usage Conditions section. Click here for a description of each field. You can use these fields to tell eDesk to auto-respond with this template only for tickets that match these fields, e.g., tickets for a particular marketplace.
9. "Hey, this is [your name]. Thanks for reaching out. I'm busy at the moment, but if you leave your name, number, and message, I'll return your call.”
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:
I personally like it. Of course, the emails that I’ve seen still say what to do if the matter is urgent and needs to be handled now — but as a person who gets 100+ emails a day, whether I tell you I’m deleting all of them when I get back or not — if it is in the thousands of emails that might accumulate in the time I am off, I’m not going to see it or respond. Better that I tell you now that you are going to have to resend the email after I return (or get my backup to handle it now) than you sit around waiting for a response that is never going to come. It is actually pretty common in my industry for any absence two weeks or more.
I’ll be on maternity leave from [DATE] until [DATE]. For general inquiries about [DEPARTMENT/ROLE], please email [CONTACT NAME]. If this matter is not time-sensitive, feel free to resend your email in [MONTH] when I will be regularly checking emails again.
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I’ll add my shout out to MS and Outlook for not only being able to schedule OoO auto replies, but for having internal and external facing options.
Make sure that customers who attempt to contact you know when you expect to be in the office again. Most customers will understand the desire to devote time and energy to the family during the holidays, but they want to know when you'll be back to provide them with your usual excellent customer service.
Tested to/from 2 iPhones (1 personal/1 work phone) and neither of them receive the designated Auto Reply Text. What am I doing wrong?
“some things are MORE important than work” definitely comes off as aggressive to me. “How DARE you email me when I’m doing something MORE IMPORTANT, and for that matter why aren’t YOU spending time with YOUR family?!”
Both of these tools are designed to help you go from Email Explorer to Email Extractor – and get you from guessing to going when it comes to dealing with your email inbox.
I am out of the office on leave and will return on September 25. Please contact Jean Awad at [email protected] in my absence.