There's being in touch with the end user, and then there's 10,000 emails saying "You suck! I've had a $500 CL for over a year and your idiot CSRs keep saying No. Give me an increase now or I will cancel and tell everyone just how bad you........"
Our (big telecom) exec team get "in touch" with the end user by hiring large expensive consulting firms who interview, analyze and produce pretty reports. And this (apart from the expense) is fine because outsiders have no need to sugarcoat, if anything the reverse ("You seem to have a bad problem with segment X, but we have some ideas that we could develop with you to fix this") and is much more statistical meaningful than glancing at a few emails.
Now if your are COO of a Fortune 100 company, and you contact the CEO of my company(who of course you would know) to complain about some aspect, you will get immediate attention. Emails start coming down saying "Fix this now" without regard to any existing prioritization.
But at least in this space, random consumer emails will be handled by people well below the executive level. But as what you really want are results, you shouldn't care if it was the CEO or the 2nd assistant lead of the customer executive team who did the magic.
Of course, YMMV, but in general I wouldn't want to work at a very big company where the CEO did pay attention to random end-user email. He/she has much more critical decisions to make, and more junior people can be deployed to deal with these issues.
