Misdirected student tickets get a ready-to-send referral drafted for the support team

XAP builds college and career readiness software for students, parents and educators. It created the first online college application, XAPplication, in 1988, and today runs Choices360, a career and college planning platform used by states such as West Virginia, Oklahoma and North Dakota; the application portals for Virginia's Community Colleges and Georgia's GAfutures; eTranscript California; and Paws in Jobland for younger students. In April 2024 it was acquired by Embrace Software Inc.

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A lot of the tickets XAP's support team receives are not about XAP's software. A student applying through GAfutures asks about HOPE scholarship eligibility, which the Georgia Student Finance Commission decides. A Virginia student cannot log in to their college's own portal, which the college runs. The right answer is a polite, accurate referral, and the team has a canned response for each case. Writing it still takes a person's time on every ticket, and the wrong referral sends a student in a circle.

XAP connected Freshdesk to eesel in June 2026 and set up two agents. XAP Bot handles referral tickets and went live in July. XAP Support Agent is a broader assistant the team can call onto any ticket by mentioning eesel in an internal note, or use through the browser extension inside Freshdesk to draft a reply. eesel reads about 880 past tickets and canned responses synced from Freshdesk.

• A filter in front of XAP Bot lets through only the referral cases and portal password resets. Anything XAP can fix inside its own software, application errors, account deletions, control center questions and tickets logged from a phone call are left for the team.
• For a referral, it pulls the content of the matching canned response and writes the complete reply as an internal note, with any parts that do not apply to that student removed.
• If it cannot tell which portal a student means, it drafts a short clarifying question instead of a referral.
• It never invents a URL, a fee, a date or a policy. If it cannot ground a detail, it leaves a placeholder for the team or hands over.
• Nothing goes to a student without a person sending it.

It is early days. Between 8 August and 8 September 2026 eesel worked about 40 Freshdesk tickets for XAP, most of them in the last week of that period as the school year started. It left about 30 internal notes, wrote 13 draft replies and ran about 20 searches of past tickets. Two more drafts came through the browser extension.

The referral agent is the first slice. XAP Support Agent, the broader assistant that works any ticket from the team's past answers, is set up with a full set of instructions but has only been used a handful of times so far. The filter in front of XAP Bot is also being widened as the team adds referral cases for its other portals.