Dan Hesse has perhaps the hardest job in the wireless industry right now. In December, he replaced Gary Forsee as president and C.E.O. of Sprint Nextel at one of the lowest points in the company’s history. Sprint lost more than a million customers in 2007 and posted a $30 billion loss in the fourth quarter alone.

But Hesse might say that his job offers the most upside: The company is so troubled that he has license to take big chances. When he took over, he promised moves on the scale of “nukes” that would shake up the wireless business.

None of his ventures so far have been quite that ambitious, but in February he introduced a single-rate plan ($99.99 a month for unlimited calls, text, and data) that may help slow the mass customer defections plaguing Sprint. Hesse also pulled together an alliance with Google, Intel, Comcast, Bright House Networks, and Time Warner Cable to launch a startup called Clearwire, which will deploy WiMax technology, a kind of WiFi on steroids. WiMax is a high-speed data network that covers a larger area than WiFi—entire cities rather than individual coffee shops. And Sprint is one of only two major carriers so far to support Google’s coming Android operating system, which will make it easier for cell phones to download software or use Web-based services from other companies. Most cell phones today are far more restricted.

Hesse, 54, might look familiar from his appearance in Sprint’s television ads. (He offers his email address, which customers can use to register gripes.) He talked with Condé Nast Portfolio contributing editor Kevin Maney at Sprint’s Overland Park, Kansas, headquarters, a sprawling faux college campus that, in more ambitious days, was built for 15,000 employees but currently houses only 10,000. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

I’m a Sprint customer, and it’s no secret that the company has just about the worst customer service on earth. How are you addressing that? Let me put it this way: It’s definitely getting better every month. We measure the hell out of it. Every meeting starts with discussing the customer experience. That said, we have a long way to go, and people have long memories. That’s part of the urgency. We know it’s going to take a while to get customers to actually perceive that service has improved.

As a Sprint client, how will I notice what you’re doing? If you went into a Sprint store before and said, “I have this problem on my bill,” they’d tell you to call customer care. Not because they were being jerks—they didn’t have access to the systems to fix a problem like that. Now they do. So even the role of the stores has changed. They sell too, but their No. 1 job is to improve the customer experience.