In our Q4 2007 Customer Experience Peer Research Panel survey, we found that 45% of the firms had a senior executive in charge of improving customer experience across products and channels. To find out what type of an effect these execs had on their companies' customer experience efforts, we compared their responses to those of firms without these types of executives. Firms with these leaders view customer experience as more important, have more enterprisewide customer experience efforts, report having fewer obstacles, do more primary customer research, and score better in all three areas of the Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD) self-test.