Dr. Whitaker and his colleagues M.S. Krishnan and C. Fornell wrote a great paper. The article can be found on WSJ.
He and his team investigated how Offshoring affects Customer Satisfaction. The result is that Offshoring has an negative impact on Customer Service.
The result will be most probably negative, either you nearshore (domestic outsourcting) or offshore to low labor cost countries.
The full research paper can be downloaded here
Larry Dignan and Tom Steinert-Threlkeld featured this article as well in their “Between the lines” Blog on ZDNet:
Study: Offshore outsourcing dings customer satisfaction; Taking back office offshore ok by ZDNet‘s Larry Dignan — A trio of professors working with the national Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan finds that offshore outsourcing hurts customer service ratings, but farming out back office operations has a limited impact. The working paper, conducted by the University of Michigan as well as Nasscom, India’s association of software and services companies, was penned [...]