With Sprint's recent earnings less awful than usual, Sprint is apparently feeling rather chatty and this week invited a select group of bloggers and reporters to tour their Kansas City headquarters (I apparently forgot to send Dan Hesse a Christmas card). During the tour, CEO Dan Hesse doled out numerous sound bytes on everything from their LTE build to the AT&T, Verizon duopoly. The prime thrust of his PR bonanza was the idea that Sprint believes they're playing the "good guy" in the wireless marketplace, with a focus on customer service and doing things AT&T and Verizon don't:Unfortunately that message hasn't always been reflected in the company's actions. Over the last several years, financial pressures have resulted in Sprint increasingly mirroring "bad guy" AT&T and Verizon's policies on everything from raising ETFs sky high to eliminating money back guarantees and banning class actions via fine print.

To compete with the duopoly, Sprint has increasingly acted just like them. Unfortunately, we're guessing that "we're slightly less bad" than other industry giants doesn't have quite the same PR ring.

About the only major thing Sprint is really doing differently from their big duopoly brothers is offering unlimited data for smartphones. That's not to diminish unlimited data, which really can help save customers money and is much simpler for most consumers to understand. However, it seems inevitable that heavy financial pressures from Sprint's iPhone deal and LTE network build will eventually bring unlimited smartphone data to an end.

That said, Sprint's customer satisfaction fortunes have slowly turned around since their troubled acquisition of Nextel. The company notes that they're streamlining everything from the network to support, and it's paying dividends. Sprint is spending half as much on support as they were several years ago, yet says they're getting fewer calls and having to offer fewer credits than ever. Customer satisfaction studies have reflected this improvement.

Hey Sprint customers: do you agree that things have dramatically improved?