First Steps at Sprint

New CEO Dan Hesse says his first priority will be to tackle the customer-service problems and customer defections that have plagued the company in the past year.

An internal Sprint document recently disclosed described the company's "inferior results" in customer service. It pointed out that Sprint resolved just 53 percent of problems on the first call, compared with 71 percent for T-Mobile USA, despite Sprint having nearly three times as many customer service reps.

One would expect no less. Hesse is viewed as a highly-competent manager, and this is the sort of problem a good manager can fix. But later, recall that Hesse was the pioneer of AT&T's "Digital One Rate" plan, which introduced flat-rate pricing to U.S. wireless consumers in the late 1990s. That one move revolutionized mobile pricing in the U.S. market.

Once he gets the churn and customer service problems under control, we'd be watching for more innovation from Sprint than one typically sees.