April 18 (Bloomberg) -- Delta Air Lines Inc., the world’s largest carrier, said it stopped routing customer service calls to India and brought them “back in house” in the U.S. because customers were unhappy.

Delta started shifting the calls to employees in the U.S. over the past year, and “completely removed” Indian contractors last quarter, Chief Executive Officer Richard Anderson said in his weekly recorded message to employees.

The move makes Delta the second big carrier to repatriate customer-service work from India in 2009, after UAL Corp.’s United Airlines did so in February. Companies including AT&T Inc. have taken similar steps, said Karl Keirstead, an outsourcing analyst at Kaufman Bros. LP in New York.

“The customer satisfaction and service quality boost they get is worth the extra costs,” Keirstead said yesterday. “It especially makes sense now because their U.S. employees may have excess capacity to handle it because business is down.”

Delta has about 4,500 employees who take customer service and reservation calls, said Betsy Talton, a spokeswoman for the Atlanta-based carrier. That’s about 6.4 percent of the workforce.

A call center for Wipro Ltd. handled customer-service duties for Delta, and the Bangalore, India-based company still works on the airline’s correspondence, Talton said.

‘Not Shy’

“Customer acceptance of call-center representatives in other countries was low, and our customers are not shy about letting us have that feedback,” Anderson said in his April 16 message.

Delta sent some calls to India and other countries as travel plunged after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the carrier joined U.S. peers in slashing jobs and flying to conserve cash before its 2005 bankruptcy filing. Delta had said previously that moving calls to India saved $25 million a year.

Call centers in Jamaica and South Africa still work with some Delta customers, chiefly from those regions, the airline said.

Delta’s traffic tumbled 14 percent in March, more than February’s 8.8 percent decline, as the global recession spread. The company has eliminated more than 6,000 jobs over the past year through buyouts, and said in February that additional reductions may be needed should the economy worsen.

Anderson didn’t say how many Delta jobs might be preserved by relocating the call-center work. United said it would return 165 call-center jobs to Chicago, where the third-largest U.S. airline is based, and Honolulu.

Delta rose 4 cents to $7.32 yesterday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have fallen 36 percent this year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Mary Jane Credeur in Atlanta at mcredeur@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: April 17, 2009 18:00 EDT