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Sprint has long been an easy target of cellular critics. Still the nation’s No. 3 provider, they’ve slipped over the past year, year and a half. The biggest blow may have come with the announcement of their first quarter results: 1.1 million customers lost to rivals. But they’ve got new CEO Dan Hesse working to change all that. It’s not an easy task — he likens it to Ernest Shackleton, an explorer who lost his ship, but not his crew, in Antarctica. If Sprint is in fact going to turn around, they might want to ditch the ship and hope the crew can forge a new one.

Customer service, in every imaginable sense of the term, is quickly becoming Sprint’s new focus. Before Hesse came aboard, former CEO Gary Forsee tried ditching problem customers. In a complete reversal, Hesse is encouraging them to vent and send complaints directly to him. Though he reads just a summary of the day’s venting, it’s certainly going further than his predecessor.

As for the poor customer service we always hear about, some Sprint employees think it’s an outdated notion.

“We’ve gotten some bad press and think we don’t deserve it,” said Brett Collins, who oversees one of Sprint’s customer care centers in Kansas. “We’re kind of tired of hearing about it.”

Mr. Collins’ overseer, Chief Service Officer Bob Johnson, tends to agree. He told The New York Times that he thinks the perception of Sprint’s customer service doesn’t match the reality.

So far, Mr. Johnson said, the results are promising, although it is too early to tell if the campaign is successful enough to stem the tide of defections over several financial quarters.

It might not work instantly, but Sprint certainly is taking steps to improve their customer service — nay, customer relations. They’ve hired a slew of new customer service reps, who supposedly can get 80 percent of the calls in 30 seconds. We’ll see if this is reflected in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which had Sprint down considerably, 8.2 percent, in the first quarter of this year, from the first quarter of 2007.

So Sprint might be past the third inning of their overhaul, but they’re certainly not at the home stretch. We’ll see if Mr. Hesse’s plan works for what has become the joke of the wireless industry

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