The default action on our support system (which we did not develop) is to "Reply and Close".
I believe Tender designed it this way because, at least in our experience, 99% of the time after we reply, we never hear from the OP again. So by always closing the discussion after we answer, it keeps our queue clean and lets us clearly see what discussions are still open awaiting our response.
Anyone can always re-open the discussion if they feel they have more to add. It's not meant in any way to try to discourage discussion. We could just delete it if that's what we had wanted to do. :)
As a user there is nothing that drives me to rage more than a company arbitrarily (from my POV) marking a ticket as closed.
Having read your post I can see the merits but if I were a user who does not know about your workflow it would make me very angry.
Why can you just not have the ticket auto-close after your reply and X days have passed, you can change your internal list to only show tickets that are open and last updated to by the customer?
I believe Tender designed it this way because, at least in our experience, 99% of the time after we reply, we never hear from the OP again. So by always closing the discussion after we answer, it keeps our queue clean and lets us clearly see what discussions are still open awaiting our response.
Anyone can always re-open the discussion if they feel they have more to add. It's not meant in any way to try to discourage discussion. We could just delete it if that's what we had wanted to do. :)