Something like, “I will not have access to email while I am out and will get back to you when I return. If your issue is urgent, please resend your email after X date,” would be… more polite, I guess.
My department still doesn’t allow us to send OOO auto-replies to external recipients because of one incident years ago (a customer tried to contact a sales rep about an urgent order, got the rep’s auto-reply, and in their ensuing panic, somehow got escalated all the way up to the company president). Any external emails we get are auto-forwarded to a centralized mailbox and (ostensibly) handled by another rep while we are out. It bothers me to know that my external contacts won’t get a reponse from me while I’m out and may think I’m just ignoring them.
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People are naturally impatient, and when they are looking for answers to their questions, they want them as soon as possible. That’s why some recipients of your auto-reply messages won’t be happy if they just get some information that you are gone and have to wait for your return. In such cases, you need to provide an alternative point of contact for urgent matters.
We had to do this at my prior position so that agents knew that we were in the office that specific day. Now i dont even use my phone as most internal people call me on Teams.
Every business is unique. There’s no one single best way to tell your clients that you’re not going to be around for the next few days (weeks or months). But there’s also no denying that whatever out of office message you use right now, you could always improve it.
My husband’s voice mails says “…if you need immediate assistance call Mary at ####…”, only Mary retired something like eight years ago. I mention this to him every once in a while. It hasn’t changed.
However, if you do choose to do this, make sure you actually follow through and do the thing you’re bragging about, unlike this New York Times reader who was just a bit too bold.
If you are a customer still in onboarding, please reach out to your Data Migration Specialist, Jane Smith, at [email protected] or 971-314-6323.
To ensure that you keep customers happy and present a professional image, make your auto-attendant easy to navigate. We’ve compiled some sample call center greeting scripts that can be used in different situations, whether your company has a small customer support team or a massive call center with hundreds of people.
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.
Honestly, what drives me crazy is after someone has emailed me, gets the out of office, then *does* email someone else instead of waiting for me to get back. Yet said someone doesn’t email me back to say “see you’re out, person X got it taken care of, you can disregard my email”. So then I waste time seeing the initial request and following up. Has anyone found a good wording / other solution to know if the request was completed by someone else?
I actually stopped changing my VM and out of office right before I left, bc I just did’nt care anymore lol. This was only one of a number of things that this company did that was bonkers.
The iPhone DND mode is supposed to use while you drive. When driving, you don’t need to divert your attention while driving, and you can set Do Not Disturb while driving. There are a few options to set Auto Text while driving. You can place on the iPhone to switch automatically to DND mode while driving by detecting motion.
But perhaps we have it all wrong, and are simply enslaving ourselves further to technology by toiling over OOOs that are personality-packed, marketing-friendly perfection. Maybe we need to be altogether more standoffish if we want to make our OOOs really work for us? NYU Professor Meredith Broussard, who’s the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, takes the inspiration for her OOO from US writer, poet and children’s author E.B. White, who once turned down an invitation from President Eisenhower with the words “I must decline, for secret reasons”. Accordingly, Broussard’s OOO reads simply: “I am out of the office, for secret reasons.”
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But really, I think people who know you WFH will get your meaning and people who don’t know you WFH won’t care or feel misled if they find out you really work from home.
No. 1 Out of office messages for lead generation:- In order to build trust and expand more sales, you are in two-way doubt whether your out-of-office email response will be ready by someone in your absence.