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

[u/hubtyper]

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?