I'm Having Issues with Surveys

I don't suppose we should complain about surveys and questionnaires - we've produced quite a few over the years, both for ourselves and for clients.

I've even completed a few over the years - sometimes to help out a company we like or partner with, sometimes to get a copy of the results for a market we have an interest in and sometimes to give feedback.

The most likely reason these days is to give feedback to one of our partners or suppliers on their customer service when we have had occasion to use it. My reasoning is simply this: if the companies we work with provide great customer service, that makes both them and us more competitive, so we both win.

So when Microsoft sent an email asking me to complete a quick survey on a recent support incident, I was happy to take a few minutes to let them know what the experience had been like.

I clicked on the link - not something I would normally do from an email, but we had had a genuine support request and the email contained the correct case number, so if this was a phishing attack, it was a pretty sophisticated one.

Having clicked on the link, I was surprised to see that my security software (Kaspersky) had blocked the site, with the reason 'threat of data loss'

Normally I'd exit there, but a bit of further research indicated that this domain had been used for Microsoft surveys, but there were also reports of other security software blocking the site and even discussion of the securestudies.com 'virus'.

At this point, I moved on to an isolated machine we use to check anything that might be considered 'dodgy', bypassed the security warning and arrived at the following:

This might warrant further research from someone else, but for now I don't know if this was a genuine request from Microsoft with bad links, or a very plausible phishing attempt (that included a genuine, recent Microsoft case number.)

Perhaps the link would have worked in Microsoft Explorer or Edge browsers rather than the Chrome browser that I was using, but by this stage I had neither the time nor the energy to investigate any further.

If it was genuine, and this wasn't an isolated error, I'd guess Microsoft won't be getting much feedback for its customer support - something it badly needs. They also want to look at the reputation of their survey service providers.

If it wasn't a genuine email from Microsoft or one of its partners, they really need to sort out the security of their case numbers.

Maybe the answer for Microsoft would be to use Microsoft Forms embedded on a microsoft.com page. That would solve any security issues and it would give them some valuable information about using one of their own products - so less user feedback required!

BTW, if anyone does want to know about using Power BI in an on-prem environment with SQL Server and SharePoint (the original point the support call), we now have the answers!

If anyone from Microsoft wants to know what their support services are really like, do get in touch - but probably not by email!