When you share transparent business information and provide alternative ways when the relevant channel is not available, it delivers a delightful service experience.
The above automated messages do not sound assuring as the time is not specified in terms of hours, days, or week. Here is a good example that businesses can follow to deliver effective customer service communication.
.
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
I’m currently out of the office this week as I’ve taken some time off to travel. However, I’ll reach out to you when I’m back.
If you know that you’re going to be out of office for a long time, it’s worth thinking about redirecting your clients to your colleague. Mention their name, explain what position they occupy and how they can help your client. Include a way to contact them in the form of an email address or a phone number. Just try to warn a colleague that you want to redirect your clients to them before going on a vacation.
The date range you're gone but more importantly . . . The day you will respond. (Pro tip: If you seriously get a ginormous volume of emails when you're away, or you're going to be gone for an extended amount of time, make sure this date is one or two days AFTER you're back from your vacation. Under promise, over deliver, do your laundry.) Alternate contact if there is an emergency. Your phone number (if you absolutely must, but I don't endorse this).
An out-of-office auto-reply serves to inform people that you aren’t available to respond to their emails. These are mainly used during the holidays.
At my old job, you used to nominate a contact for when you were out of the office and there wasn’t an obvious person to contact. One department was so small that they all just put the all team email so they never had to change it. Trouble is, it turns out Outlook team emails by default only accept internal messages :X
Let’s say you’re a CFO headed to Cancun for your annual vacation. You write an OOO message that contains: The dates of your departure and return Contact information for a colleague that will be available in your absence Some details about your destination
I don’t need some fancy, forensic gin-juggler to tell me why I like something. Just keep it simple. And real happiness is about simplicity.
About the “overshares”: You linked to a previous column that mentioned this point, “Sometimes the over-sharing of plans can even come across as suspect — similar to how when someone’s calling in sick with genuine illness, they usually just say, ‘I’m going to be out sick,’ but fakers will generally give you a long list of overly specific symptoms, like they feel they have to convince you.”
Wishing you all of the Hope, Wonder, and Joy that the Season can bring!Warmest wishes of the Season from our family to yours.Let us cherish family and friends this Holiday Season.Wishing you a season filled with warm moments and cherished memories. Specify the duration of leave and name of the colleague who will handle your work responsibilities in your absence. Furnish contact details for any urgent requirement and mention your date of joining back work.
That said, I promised my wife that I am going to try to disconnect, get away and enjoy our vacation as much as possible. So, I’m going to experiment with something new. I’m going to leave the decision in your hands:
How to enable Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) when traveling outside the United States.
I use a basic OOO message – “Hi! I’m out of the office x date(s). I will return your email when I’m back at my computer on x date. If you have an urgent matter, please contact x or y. Have a nice weekend/holiday/etc!/Thanks!” My office WANTS us to use more personal and witty OOO messages like this article’s message. And that stresses me out. I don’t want to spend time worried about whether my OOO is witty. I don’t want to annoy other people just looking for basic info like when am I back and who they can contact in the meantime. I correspond a lot with third parties on serious matters (legal), and I don’t think a message like that is appropriate. So, I just keep using my basic message and hope my supervisor’s supervisor doesn’t email me and see that I’m not “trying.” Ugh.
An out of office email is an automatic response you can set up to be sent when someone tries to get in touch with you whilst you’re away from the office.
When I worked at Nightmare Small Business(tm), a coworker went on maternity leave with (privately shared among the staff, but not with the owner) the intent to give her notice at the end rather than return. She left a very professional, concise and informative out of office message. The owner proceeded to log in to her email and change the message to include saccharine references to both the pregnancy/baby and how much she “missed” being away from clients and how excited she was to return soon.