Are You Missing a Chance to Humanise Your Auto Responses?

The out of office replies I get from people are generally rubbish.

Short, no punctuation and boring.

It doesn't need to be so and over the last few weeks I've been experimenting with making them personal, interesting and useful.

Rather than the standard reply I've included specific detail on where I am and who I am seeing, have added an interesting link or included a quote.

The feedback I've had has been fantastic.  As it isn't what people are expecting it has stood out and created an element of surprise. I've had return e-mails commenting on things I'm up to, saying thanks for the link and it gives a conversation starter if I'm on the phone to someone.

None of it is rocket science, but it just shows how important the small things can be and the impact they can have.  In this day and age it can be too easy to hide behind automatic responses and impersonal e-mails and the key thing for me is to look for opportunities to humanise your communications and make them personal.

It is not just out of office replies that this applies to.  There is your e-mail signature (I'm going to try some different things with that in the next few weeks), the auto replies supporters receive when they register for your e-mails or make a donation and even the error pages on your internet pages (check out some examples of these at this site).

Do you have any automated responses that you've personalised?

What response have you had?

Are there any other ways you can make these mundane, standard responses interesting?

I'd love to hear your thoughts...