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What counts as a yes
By the end you'll have the exact reminder wording and a set list of replies that count as confirmation, so anyone on your team reads a client's answer the same way.
By Yodai · Published on September 6, 2026 · Updated on October 12, 2026
You ask the customer to confirm their appointment before a deadline, and you still need to decide which phrase counts as confirmation. There's a slot booked for Thursday at five. On Tuesday you send the reminder by WhatsApp and the customer replies: "okay, I'll definitely be there". To you that's a clear yes. To whoever helps you with the schedule, it doesn't have to be: you never agreed anywhere that "okay" means confirmed, and "I'll definitely be there" is a phrase anyone could read their own way.
Before asking for confirmations, you decide which appointments need one and at what point an unconfirmed appointment stops belonging to the customer. What's missing is the piece that connects the two: what the customer has to reply for that appointment to count as confirmed, without anyone having to ask you first. If this isn't decided precisely, everything else gets shaky: you won't know which slots are still open, which ones you can release, or which ones to offer someone else. Everything depends on settling this first.
The problem isn't the person reading, it's the question
A common mistake is thinking it's enough to read carefully, as if everyone would understand any phrase the same way. It's the opposite: the more open the question you send, the more different ways people find to answer it, and no word list covers the whole language. If you ask "all good for Thursday?", you'll get "yes," "sure," "perfect," "I'll be there," "okay," a thumbs up, and silence. Six ways of saying the same thing, and each person on your team would read them their own way.
The solution isn't to interpret better. It's to ask in a way that leaves room for only one reasonable answer. You close the question, and with it, you close off the possible answers too.
The closed list of what counts
With the question closed, you can build the list. It's not a list of phrases, it's a list of words, and it doesn't matter how they're written: capitalized or not, with a stray period, or with an extra space. "YES", "Yes", "yes " and "yes." all land in the same bucket. Otherwise, a customer typing a quick reply from their phone gets left out of their own yes, and that's a worse mistake than having no list at all.
The confirmed bucket gets the words your customers actually use: "yes", "confirmed", "sounds good", "okay". The canceled bucket gets "no", "can't make it", "cancel". Anything that doesn't fall cleanly into either bucket is left alone: it stays pending, neither confirmed nor canceled.
When the reply doesn't fit any list
A pending case isn't a failure, it's the correct outcome when the customer hasn't given a clear yes. Don't turn it into a yes for convenience, or a no out of caution: both are made-up data. "Pending" means exactly that, nothing more and nothing less, and it's the signal the next lesson will use to decide what to do with a slot nobody has confirmed yet.
What you can do with the pending ones is review them yourself once a day, not after every message. If you notice the same phrase coming up from several customers, that's a candidate for the closed list. The list isn't written once and forgotten, it grows with what your customers actually say.
- Compares the whole answer against a handful of known words
- Fails predictably: whatever it doesn't recognize, it leaves pending
- Anyone on your team reaches the same conclusion from the same answer
- Understands nuance and new phrases you never anticipated
- Can get rare cases right that the list would never cover
- When it fails, it fails with confidence: it gives a definite yes or no about something ambiguous
- Two people can read the same answer differently
Which one to pick: Use the closed list by default, especially if more than one person handles the schedule: whatever doesn't match stays pending and you review it; a judgment call gone wrong costs you a wrongly given slot and you never find out. Leave open interpretation for businesses with few appointments a day, where you review every conversation yourself anyway.
- The reminder asks for a closed answer, not an open-ended opinion
- The list of words that count as yes and no is written down, and it works the same whether it has an accent or not, capitalized or not
- Anything that doesn't match the list stays pending, without being marked as a yes or a no
- The whole answer counts, never just a piece of it
Test yourself
Answer before opening each one. If one gives you trouble, go back to the section that explains it.
1. A customer replies "Yess, ill be there," with an extra letter and no apostrophe. The closed list doesn't have that exact variant.
It stays pending, it doesn't get forced into confirmed. If that way of writing it shows up with more customers, you add it to the list; guessing once just to avoid leaving it pending is the same mistake as stopping at the yes without reading the rest.
2. A customer responds with just a thumbs-up instead of text.
It doesn't count as confirmation, because it's not on your list. You reply with one line, "Should I confirm it? Reply YES or NO," and if over time you see a lot of customers confirming this way and everyone on your team reads it the same, you add it to the list.
3. A customer doesn't reply at all to the reminder, and the deadline you set for confirming passes.
It's still neither a yes nor a no: silence isn't a reply the closed list has to resolve, it's an expiring deadline. What to do with that open slot is exactly what the next lesson covers.
In Yodai your clients request a time on your site and you confirm it from your dashboard. See how online booking for your business works.
NextYou release the slot at the set time