The Age of Understanding: Why Customer Experience Is Entering Its Most Human Era Yet

For decades customer experience has been built on an ever-expanding pursuit of data. Brands have collected, synthesised, stored, and analysed what people do. Everything from clicks, purchases, opens, behaviours: all of it has been collated in the belief that more information equates to better relationships. But, according to Andrea Cook, CEO of JAM CRM, that era is coming to an end.

“The next evolution won’t be in knowing what people do, or even predicting what they might do next,” Andrea tells me. “It will be knowing why they do it. Why a customer feels what they feel. Why they lean in, why they turn away, why they trust, and why they don’t.”

This shift, from behaviour to motivation, from activity to emotion, marks what the agency CEO describes as the beginning of a new chapter for customer experience. “We are standing at the edge of a new era,” she asserts. “Not the Age of Data, not the Age of Identity, but the Age of Understanding.”

From Persuasion to Attunement

So, what does this mean for marketing? According to Andrea, this is the moment where persuasion evolves into attunement. “The role of a brand is no longer to interrupt someone’s life, but to understand it deeply enough to actually belong there,” she asserts.

For much of modern marketing, optimisation has been the goal. Faster funnels. Shorter paths to conversion. More automation layered onto increasingly complex systems. But what Andrea is describing is the next competitive advantage, which won’t come from efficiency at all, but a more emotionally driven place altogether.

“For decades, we optimised for efficiency,” she says. “But the next competitive advantage will be empathy — the ability to sense context, tone, and emotion across every touchpoint.”

In practical terms, that means customer systems capable of interpreting how someone feels which will make way for CRMs that respond to uncertainty, frustration, hesitation, or trust. “Imagine CRMs that read mood, not just metrics,” Andrea suggests. “They’ll adapt language, timing, even channels intuitively.”

Customer systems being able to pre-empt the moods of the consumer may seem like a way off, but this calibre of context-adaptive communication isn’t theoretical. In fact, Andrea is equipped with multiple examples of industries already deploying systems that detect emotional signals.

“Companies like Southwest, AmEx, and Marriott already use systems that can detect: rising frustration in a customer’s tone, hesitation, negative emotional direction, urgency based on pacing and volume,” she says. “Then, in response to this, they automatically shorten wait times, escalate to a live agent, modify scripts, shift tone etc. This is context-adaptive communication in practice.”

The Post-Channel Era

With systems growing more and more intelligent, Andrea argues that something else could begin to disappear: the channel itself. “When technology gets sophisticated, it becomes invisible,” she says. “And when that happens, something powerful emerges — the interface dissolves, and the relationship persists.”

In this future, brands no longer plan communications by channel: email versus social versus search etc. Instead, systems will interpret behaviour directly, determining how and when to reach someone, and continuously adapting in the background. “The signal becomes the interface. The data becomes the channel,” she explains. “That’s the shift from channel planning to outcome intelligence.”

Early versions of this already exist too. “Your car schedules its own service. Your fridge orders the milk. Your streaming platform knows you’re stressed and gently queues Bridgerton instead of Dexter.” It would seem systems have already determined how to reach someone and are constantly adapting, invisibly, in the background…

Zero-Click Relationship Management

In summary, Andrea is dubbing this next phase of CRM as zero-click relationship management, describing a world where insight, outreach, and personalisation happen without forms, clicks, or explicit instructions. “The future isn’t about collecting more data,” she says. “It’s about finding the right, consequential, empathetic data in the moment, and closing the loop between insight and action instantly.”

In this model, systems recognise when someone needs reassurance, when they’re open to something new, or when they’re quietly drifting away. And this won’t be because they’ve explicitly said so, but rather because their behaviour reveals it.

Platforms like Spotify and Amazon already operate this way, predicting preferences, life-stage shifts, and intent before users consciously articulate them.

Of course, as systems grow more predictive, Andrea is clear-eyed about the risk. She refers to how today’s consumers – particularly Gen Z and Gen Alpha – are deeply algorithm-aware. “They can spot manipulation instantly,” she says. “They know when an algorithm is serving them versus serving the brand.”

In fact, on platforms like TikTok, users actively discuss how to “reset” recommendation systems when personalisation feels invasive or misaligned. For Andrea, this signals a crucial inflection point. “As our systems get smarter, data dignity has to be built into our DNA,” she says. “Transparent algorithms. Consent as culture. Value exchange as the norm.”

The CEO is keen to highlighting the importance of “treating customers as partners, not data points.”

Thinking About 2026 and Beyond

Looking forward, Andrea predicts a fundamental transformation in how business systems operate. “By 2035, reactive data systems will give way to anticipatory empathy engines. Platforms that understand and respond to context, care, and consequence.”

In that future, machines will process infinite complexity but humans will remain responsible for meaning, interpretation, and judgment. For Andrea and JAM CRM, the promise of this next era marks the beginning of something more profound than simply automation for the sake of automation.

“We began the digital age believing technology would make us superhuman,” she reflects. “In actual fact, what it’s really doing is making us more human than ever!"