Customer education in 2026: 3 obstacles to high performance and how to solve them.

Challenge 1:
Innovation is getting harder to extract.

Today’s organisations expect constant innovation and ever-increasing customer delight, yet the margins for innovation have never been thinner. Like Formula 1 teams shaving milliseconds off pit stops, customer education teams are asked to deliver more, faster, with fewer clear breakthroughs available. At the same time, pressures like “enshittification,” rising customer scepticism, and intense competition make delight even harder to achieve and many teams are simply depleted. In this climate, asking people to innovate on demand can feel like asking them to sprint a marathon.

Three ways to address this challenge:

1. Focus first on personal priorities:

Teams cannot deliver delight from survival mode. Leaders must strip back noise and offer absolute clarity via clear role expectations, transparent communication, simplified KPIs and behaviour-driven definitions of success

2. Reduce ambiguity by defining roles and governance:

A major cause of stagnation is simply not knowing who owns what. Leaders must clearly define roles and governance. After all, clarity is energising and it restores confidence.

3. Communicate through lead indicators, not lag indicators:

Instead of emphasising churn reduction or NPS, articulate the small daily behaviours that create those outcomes. This helps teams understand what to do, not just what to achieve.

Challenge 2:
Rebuilding connection in an era of disconnection.

Today’s workforce is navigating a loneliness epidemic, especially in hybrid and global teams. Without genuine human connection, collaboration suffers, empathy collapses, and innovation slows. To this end, leaders must realise that connection isn’t just a “nice to have, it’s a performance multiplier. After all, teams don’t just work harder when they feel connected, they work better too.

Three ways to address this challenge:

1. Make room for human moments:

Leaders must intentionally build interdependency, shared purpose, and face-to-face interaction where possible. Examples could include small rituals to reconnect teams or bringing teams physically together for marquee moments.

2. Create opportunities for customer-to-team connection:

Delight comes from closeness to customers. Hosting intimate customer events, even small ones, gives teams direct visibility into real user needs and motivations. Create spaces where customers and teams can meet as humans, not transactions.

3. Use immersive experiences to rebuild empathy:

Immersive, screen-free experiences - whether workshops, offsites, or hands-on activities - help teams break old patterns, reconnect with each other, and see their work from new perspectives. These moments boost energy, deepen empathy, and strengthen unity.

Challenge 3:
Building a high-performance culture that sustains pace.

Customer centricity is an endurance sport that requires sprint energy. Teams need creativity, agility, and resilience, but those qualities don’t emerge from pressure alone. They emerge from conditions.

Three ways to address this challenge:

1. Shift from reacting to anticipating:

Customer education teams spend much of their time responding to customer requests, internal escalations, or backlog items. But delight happens when teams anticipate needs before they surface.

This requires rituals that build foresight, protected time for creative thinking, structured ways to scan customer signals and leadership that values “breathing in” (inspiration) as much as “breathing out” (output).

2. Use play principles to unlock imagination:

Creativity is not a trait, it’s a muscle. Playful techniques such as rapid idea bursts, constraint-based challenges, or hands-on prompts help teams to break patterns, explore possibilities, and generate novel solutions more easily.

Play reduces cynicism, boosts psychological safety, and accelerates fresh thinking, all of which are essential for delight-driven work.

3. Seek inspiration outside your industry:

Stepping beyond your day-to-day environment exposes teams to new ideas, fresh perspectives, and different models of excellence.

Whether it’s learning from other industries, visiting inspiring organisations, or exploring standout customer experiences, outside inspiration can spark new thinking and elevate what “great” looks like.

Moving forward.

The mandate for delight is not going away. But delight can’t be demanded. It must be enabled, by:

1. Supporting personal priorities (clarity, role certainty, psychological safety)
2. Rebuilding connection (team unity, empathy, human moments)
3. Creating high-performance conditions (inspiration, anticipation, imaginative thinking)

By embracing these conditions, leaders can unlock sustainable pace, creativity, and customer obsession, even in an era defined by exhaustion and uncertainty.

As Josh put it, “delight cannot be created in survival mode.” It emerges when leaders stop chasing pace and start influencing it. Learn more about how Sponge is helping global organisations build high-performance, customer-obsessed teams in the age of Generation Numb on our Customer Education page.