How Upwork Transformed Chatbot QA with MaestroQA

Upwork’s chatbot plays a critical role in helping customers navigate the platform and resolve common issues. However, as chatbot adoption grew, so did its challenges—hallucinations, inaccurate responses, and a lack of structured QA made it difficult to ensure high-quality interactions.

Upwork’s AI Operations team needed a structured Chatbot QA process to ensure chatbot accuracy, reduce hallucinations, and optimize AI-driven support. After implementing MaestroQA’s Chatbot QA process, Upwork was able to cut QA time from 16 hours per week to seconds, improve AI accuracy, and create a scalable system for chatbot evaluation.

We've learned that QA is essential for any customer support operation—chatbots need to be treated like agents, and their development must include a structured QA process. Now that we have this in place, we can move beyond just evaluating the chatbot and focus on making groundbreaking improvements that drive real benefits for our customers"

Alix Pérez

AI Operations Admin

Challenge: Chatbot Hallucinations and a Manual, Inefficient QA Process

Upwork’s chatbot was designed to be a self-service concierge for users, but the team faced persistent challenges:

• AI hallucinations and inaccurate responses: The chatbot sometimes provided misleading or incorrect information, creating confusion for users and requiring agent intervention.
• Limited insight into chatbot performance: While the chatbot analytics provided basic data, they didn’t offer enough detail to assess where and why failures were happening.
• Manual QA was time-consuming and inefficient: The team spent 16+ hours per week manually reviewing only 1% of chatbot conversations in spreadsheets, making it difficult to track systemic issues.
• Missed insights from chatbot interactions: The random sampling method didn’t always capture edge cases or frequent failure points, making optimization reactive rather than proactive.

Without a structured approach to chatbot QA, Upwork was reactively addressing issues rather than proactively improving AI accuracy and efficiency.

Solution: Implementing a Scalable Chatbot QA Process

To solve these challenges, Upwork leveraged MaestroQA’s Chatbot QA capabilities to build a structured approach to evaluating chatbot interactions.

• Automated, AI-Assisted Chatbot QA: Instead of manually reviewing conversations, Upwork used AutoQA and AskAI to analyze chatbot responses at scale.
• Custom QA Rubrics: Upwork created Custom Rubrics to assess chatbot accuracy, escalation effectiveness, and human-likeness—just like grading a support agent.
• Targeted Issue Identification: Instead of relying on random sampling, Upwork shifted to Targeted QA to track chatbot failure points more effectively.
• Eliminating Spreadsheet-Based QA: By integrating chatbot evaluation into MaestroQA, Upwork eliminated its manual, time-consuming review process.

Results: A More Accurate Chatbot and More Efficient and Scalable Chatbot QA

By integrating MaestroQA’s Chatbot QA framework, Upwork transformed chatbot evaluation into a scalable process—delivering measurable improvements:

• Reduced AI Hallucinations → QA-driven insights helped refine chatbot prompts and response logic, leading to more accurate and reliable answers.
• Faster QA Process → Upwork cut chatbot review time from 16 hours per week to seconds, making the process far more efficient.
• Improved Visibility into Chatbot Performance → The team now has greater insight into chatbot failures and escalations, allowing them to refine AI responses faster.
• Better Self-Service and Customer Support Alignment → Insights from chatbot QA helped Upwork refine its knowledge base and platform processes to improve both self-service and agent-assisted support.

💡 Want to go deeper on optimizing chatbot performance? Learn more in our blog: The Crucial Role of QA in Revolutionizing Chatbot Interactions

Impact: A Smarter Chatbot That Continues to Improve

By treating its chatbot like an agent and applying structured QA practices, Upwork has moved from reactive troubleshooting to proactive, scalable optimization—ensuring AI-generated responses meet the same quality standards as human agents.

With MaestroQA’s Chatbot QA, Upwork can now:

Your chatbot is only as good as your QA process.

Learn how AI-driven QA can reduce hallucinations, improve response accuracy, and scale chatbot evaluation in seconds. Schedule a demo today!