We asked 190 executives from North American banks about their customer experience efforts. A little more than half of these execs report that their bank has an executive in charge of improving customer experiences across products and channels. We found that banks with these senior customer experience execs view customer experience as more critical, embark on more customer experience initiatives, establish more formal processes, and focus more on the needs of customers. While a senior customer experience executive can pay dividends for a bank, he or she can only succeed in the right environment. Given the importance of cultural change in the effort, banks are engaged in an invisible customer experience war.