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I can’t remember if this was just an outgoing voice message before routing you to an individual, or for a voicemail, but I remember a fun December phone message from a small company (I think an insurance agency) sung to the tune of a Christmas carol–something like Jingle Bells. The content was something like: you’ve reached our office during this holiday season, hope your holidays are happy, please 1) leave a message or 2) press X for who you want. Other than the tune, it wasn’t overly holiday-centric (for those who don’t celebrate the holidays) and it was cute.
haha no offense taken. No one wanted to read (or even listen!) to all that. We only did it so she’d stop ruining our Mondays with epic 1-hour rants about what terrible people we are. And no, none of the projects we worked on were ever so critical or time-sensitive!
When you have to be away from work even for a day, you have to add an out of office message so the person who is looking for you will know that you will delay with your answer or to know who else can contact you.
So there you have it! While having fun with your auto-responder, try not to get carried away and end up upsetting anyone or get in trouble with HR! 😉
Depending on the type of holiday, you can create specific templates for various holidays such as Christmas Thanksgiving, New Year etc.:
When crafting an out-of-office reply, keep in mind that you must provide sufficient detail so that recipients understand exactly when you’ll not be able to respond.
You may not think it, but an auto-attendant is an important part of your business. It is typically the first point of contact with your customers, as they will call your main number with sales inquiries, troubleshooting questions, etc.
By bringing some automation into the process, you not only ensure that your staff is leaving vacation email messages that cover what’s needed, but you’re also eliminating the possibility that team members will forget to turn them on.
Confirm any expected deliveries will not be left at your door or unattended. Reschedule if necessary.
For specific assistance, I’ll be responding to emails on [date]. If you need something resolved urgently, please contact [Contact Name] at [contact email].
Please note that all company offices will be closed [date] to [date]. We will reopen [date], and close again for [date] and [date]. We wish you all the warmest of holiday cheer!
I once left a kind of breezy, fun out of office message for “people inside my organization” that said the literal truth: “I am out of office this week at a mountain resort where I have paid many hundreds of dollars for someone to take my electronics away from me. I’ll get back to you Monday,” and a very normal and professional OOO for “people outside my organization.” Needless to say I returned to a message from a senior (but not, I stress, my boss or even on my team) colleague calling me out on it. People surely can make things their business.
But I'm someone who has co-workers in almost every time zone, on almost every continent, and in almost every geographic region, and I simply can't imagine using most of these examples with co-workers in, say, South Korea or Japan or Nicaragua. Like, the account manager who reaches out to me for help accessing a particular system in Seoul doesn't need my personal story about why I'm taking time off and all the fun (or, for that matter, not fun) things that I'll be doing — they need help gaining access to [system] in order to complete the job tasks that have been assigned to them. If I am not available to help them, they need to know who can, and if there just *isn't* anyone else who can perform this task, they need to know when I will be able to.
Hey, there! I’m out of the office this week, but my Twitter signal is always on. Seriously, I’ve got robotic wonder thumbs! (No, not really.) I never fail to tweet fascinating stories about how people can win big with their marketing efforts. So, until I’m back at my desk, won’t you follow me [LINK]? Whether you follow me or not, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can upon returning to my desk on [DATE].