Here's something most small business owners get: to be successful, you have to make your customers happy. It's a relatively simple rule, which makes it all the more shocking when some businesses—particularly big corporations—manage to botch it so badly. Take Sprint, whose name has become synonymous with ridiculously bad customer service, terrible reception, or just plain evil, depending on who you ask. Things got so bad for the company earlier this year that they lost over a million customers just in the first quarter alone. By their own admission, they've hit rock bottom.

Now, the New York Times reports, they're trying to turn things around.

But is there anything a company in this position can actually do to make things right? Because Sprint is Sprint, they'll probably continue in some form or another—but if this were a small business, wouldn't the death knell already have been sounded? For its part, Sprint seems to believe that there's actually a way to recapture lost business and turn things around. They're making a stab at it by ramping up customer service and running a series of ads featuring the companies new CEO, Daniel Hesse.

While the ad's warm and fuzzy and personal—can it really do the dirty job of wiping away customers' memories of spotty reception, surly customer service, and generally crappy service? It strikes me that nothing short of sending ex-Sprint customers a fat check will woo them back.

But what do you think?