Adidas: South America chatbot expansion
Conversation Design Institute · 6-month engagement
Conversation design Localisation UX writing Retail & e-commerce
Scope:
Brazil market deployment
My role
Senior conversation designer
Duration:
6 Months
The challenge
I was assigned help Adidas extend their customer support chatbot into South America, with personal responsibility for the successful deployment of the Brazilian market. The task required balancing adherence to the global baseline chatbot (which was built on the Cognigy platform) with a genuine understanding of local tone, culture, and language expectations. Alongside localisation, the project also called for a full redesign of the order status journeys, which had become overly complex and business-focused.
Key problems solved
Global baseline vs. local voice
The existing chatbot had been built around a US-centric tone and structure. Expanding to Brazil required more than translation - it required a deliberate conversation about what "on-brand" means in a different cultural context. At CDI, I was instrumental in advocating for local chatbot being allowed room to reflect the market in tone - where it felt natural. I employed the same strategy here and successfully created a strong branch for the Brazilian Adidas chatbot.
Constraint
The local teams felt unhappy about having the tone of their local chatbot dictated by the global US-English baseline and that it would impact the natural feel of the chatbot.
Outcome
Working closely with local stakeholders, I developed room in the style guide to document and allow for local divergences where it felt more natural for the user experience.
Tone consistency across a localised team
While enabling the Brazilian product team to be more independent in their localisation, the style guide divergences introduced a risk of tone drift across flows. My role was to act as the quality standard, ensuring that the agreed voice carried through every journey, regardless of who had written it.
Risk
Without centralised oversight, localised content would vary in tone, formality, and structure. This risked eroding the consistency of the user experience.
Outcome
I took ownership of reviewing the tone across all flows in the Brazilian corpus. I provided feedback and guidance to the local team to maintain a coherent, user-centred voice throughout.
Making order status journeys more clear and straightforward
The existing order status flows used convoluted, business-focused language that made it hard for users to quickly understand where their order was, what was happening, or what to do if something had gone wrong. The language served internal processes rather than user needs.
Before
Technical, process-driven language that placed the burden of interpretation on the user. This led to confusion and unnecessary handovers.
After
I redesigned the flows using CDI's core conversation design principles. Employing clear, user-first language reduced journey friction and made it easier for users to access their order data.
What I did
End-to-end deployment ownership · Locale-specific tone and voice definition · Stakeholder collaboration with engineering and product teams · Tone quality review across localised flows · Order status journey redesign · Cognigy platform configuration · Cross-functional alignment between global and local teams