Best practice for closing tickets

[KPS]

This may be a general helpdesk question rather than a specific OTRS question.

We use our OTRS as a support ticket system to record customer support calls for the software we write. These mainly come in via email.

OTRS has been working really well for us as before we were just monitoring calls via email. The issue I have is that our customer very rarely let us know when a call is closed. This means we have dozens of open tickets. I sometimes chase them up to see if they can be closed by I rarely get a reply.

I was thinking of sending out a reply once I believe a ticket should be closed and it hasn't been responded to in 14 days, saying something along the lines of.

"This ticket is pending closure, if you believe the support issue is still open, please reply to this mail within 7 days. If there is no reply in this time then the ticket will be automatically closed.

"If it needs reopening at a later date, please send us an email at support@xxxx.com referencing this ticket number. A new ticket will be opened and you will receive a new ticket number"

Then I would set the ticket state to Auto close, 7 days from then.

I'd be interested to know if anyone else has similar experiences and how they handle it in OTRS