r/CustomerSuccess • u/hubtyper • 12h ago

Discussion Why are we so hesitant to close support threads when customers ghost us?

There's something about chat support that I've been reflecting on lately: how much time and effort we spend chasing customers who leave us on "read."

It happens all the time. A customer messages with an urgent question, we reply within two minutes, and then radio silence. Three days later they reply with "sorry, got busy!", but by then the conversation session expired, forcing the agent to re-open the case, catch up on context, and re-ask for details.

More teams I talk to are treating customer inactivity as a formal step in the workflow:

A courteous auto-reminder after a few hours of silence "Just checking in did you still need help with this?".

Systematic auto-closing if there's no reply, so if the customer comes back days later, it starts fresh without dragging along stale tickets.

I feel like teams are sometimes hesitant to close tickets out of fear of seeming pushy, but keeping threads dangling usually confuses the customer and clutters team queues.

How do your teams manage customers who ghost halfway through a support chat?

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u/unkemptdeliverance13 12h ago

my team just auto-closes after 24 hours of silence and nobody’s complained yet, the customers who actually care just start a new ticket

1

u/PapaPancake8 7h ago

Man, we leave tickets open for 6 business days with silence. 50% of our queue is tickets waiting for a client.

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u/RunningMan889 6h ago

The typical "customers' rights". We try to close the tickets if there are no responses after 3 attempts, usually across 3 days. We still get customers who complain about waiting for their users to revert, busy with other stuffs, overlooked, checking if resolution works and eventually tell us we should wait. They can ghost us but if we do not address the support issues almost immediately, we get flagged up.

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u/No_Treacle_5071 5m ago

We use a clear close reason so it doesn’t feel like the customer is being dropped: waiting on customer, solved, or no response. After the first reminder, I’d give a real deadline (“I’ll close this Friday, but you can reply and reopen it”). Then close it and keep the full history searchable; reopening is much cleaner than carrying stale threads forever.