REC Limited: Salesforce Service Cloud at the core of India's rooftop-solar grievance platform
REC Limited — the Maharatna PSU and National Programme Implementing Agency for PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana — turned to Nanostuffs to replace a single-channel, manually tracked grievance process with a Salesforce Service Cloud and Experience Cloud platform built for national scale: five citizen intake channels, automatic case routing, and self-service tracking for every one of India's rooftop-solar grievances.
Citizens had no self-service visibility — no ticket number to track, no status to check, no channel of their own choosing.
At a glance
Client
REC Limited — Maharatna PSU, Ministry of Power, and National Programme Implementation Agency for PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana
Challenge
A grievance process built for a smaller mandate — single-channel intake, manually tracked cases — facing the volumes of a flagship national scheme
Solution
Salesforce Service Cloud at the core, Experience Cloud for partner organisations: five intake channels and a custom case-assignment matrix
Result
660,000+ grievances handled. Resolution time down from 10–15 days to ~4 days. Platform users up from ~20 to 3,500 as IT and Discom teams joined the process
When a national mandate outgrows the process behind it
REC Limited is a Maharatna company under the Ministry of Power and the National Programme Implementation Agency for PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana — the scheme set up to bring rooftop solar and up to 300 free units of electricity a month to a crore of Indian households. As the implementing agency, REC owns the citizen grievances that come with a programme of that reach, PAN-India.
The existing grievance process had served REC well at its original scale: a call-centre intake, with cases logged and tracked by REC's agents. But it was designed around a single team and a single channel. Case ownership was assigned manually, and partner teams — IT and the state Discoms — sat outside the system, so REC's agents coordinated updates and follow-ups with them offline. Raising a ticket also asked a lot of the citizen, with an extensive set of inputs required over a phone call.
Two structural gaps mattered most as the scheme took off. Citizens had no self-service visibility — no ticket number to track, no status to check, no channel of their own choosing. And with a newly launched national programme generating queries at a pace that would only accelerate, REC needed a platform designed for that trajectory, not a process that would need to scale by adding headcount.
Engagement Snapshot
- Industry
- Government / Public Sector (Power)
- Geography
- PAN-India
- Users
- ~3,500 (REC, Discom, vendor, IT)
- Core platform
- Salesforce Service Cloud + Experience Cloud
- Integration
- PM Surya Ghar National Portal API
Why Service Cloud was the right core for grievance management at national scale
Grievance management is, at heart, case management at scale — exactly what Salesforce Service Cloud is built for. A grievance maps cleanly to a Case record with a defined lifecycle and status, and Service Cloud handles that lifecycle, status tracking and ownership natively, at volumes far beyond what any manually coordinated process can sustain. Just as important, the process spans organisations: REC's own staff, state Discoms, and installing vendors all needed to work on cases, and Experience Cloud brings those external partners into the same system with appropriately scoped access.
The judgement was where to configure and where to build. Nanostuffs used Service Cloud's Case model, an Experience Cloud portal for Discom and vendor users, and secure OTP-based access largely off the shelf. What no platform ships out of the box is the logic for deciding who should own each grievance — and that gap is where the real engineering went.
What Salesforce Service Cloud + Experience Cloud handles natively
- Case lifecycle, status and ownership through Service Cloud
- Role- and permission-based access for internal and external users
- An Experience Cloud portal for Discom and vendor users to work cases directly
Where custom engineering was needed
Routing. The right owner for a grievance could not be expressed as a single queue or a simple assignment rule — it depended on a combination of factors, across teams both inside and outside REC. That is the hard problem the platform had to solve.
What we built
01 · Layer
Five channels, one case
The National Portal, a WhatsApp bot, email, Facebook Messenger and the 155555 helpline all create the same Case record, with National Portal data pulled in via API and the citizen issued a ticket number.
Omni-channel / API02 · Layer
The assignment matrix
Every case is classified by category, sub-category, geography and who raised it, then assigned automatically — to REC officials, the IT team, the relevant Discom, or the installing vendor.
Apex / Flow03 · Layer
Owned, updated, visible
Discom, vendor and IT users work their cases in Experience Cloud, while citizens track status, receive updates, and reopen a ticket if an issue is not resolved.
Experience CloudOne case, many owners: routing that no queue could express
Two things collided. Cases were arriving through five different channels, and each one had to be handed to one of several teams — REC officials, the IT team, a state Discom, or the installing vendor. Some of those teams sit inside REC; others are entirely separate organisations working on an Experience Cloud portal.
The obvious approach — a fixed set of queues, or a simple owner rule on one field — broke immediately. The right owner did not depend on any single attribute. It depended on the combination: the grievance category and sub-category, the state and Discom involved, and who raised the case in the first place — a consumer, a vendor on their own behalf, or a vendor acting for a consumer.
The fix was not a bigger set of queues — it was a matrix the business could own.
Nanostuffs built a custom assignment matrix: a configurable mapping from that combination of category, sub-category, geography and initiator to the responsible team and portal. When a new case is created, the platform reads the combination and assigns it automatically — internal team or external partner alike — so ownership is established at the moment of creation, with no manual triage step in between.
Before
- Case ownership assigned manually, tracked in spreadsheets.
- IT and Discom teams outside the system; updates coordinated offline.
- A single call-centre intake; no citizen self-service tracking.
After
- Every case auto-assigned at creation via the assignment matrix.
- REC, IT, Discom and vendors all working the same records.
- Five channels in; citizens track, reopen and get updates.
How we delivered it
A scoped, phased build: understand the grievance landscape first, prove each module in a sandbox, then deliver PAN-India and keep iterating with REC.
Discovery
Worked with REC and MNRE stakeholders to map grievance types, teams and channels, and proposed the Service Cloud + Experience Cloud solution.
Build & demo
Delivered in a sandbox and walked REC through each module — intake, the assignment matrix, the portals — for verification and sign-off.
Rollout
Went live PAN-India in June 2025 across REC, Discom, vendor and IT users, with all five citizen channels and the National Portal integration active.
Run & iterate
Monitoring the platform in production and delivering enhancements as REC's requirements evolve.
What changed for REC Limited
Real numbers only — pending metrics await client-approved data.
grievances handled across all five channels since go-live
resolution time before GMS vs today — the sharpest outcome number
platform users — from REC-only to REC, IT and Discom combined
of tickets raised via self-service channels — not the helpline
Resolution time from 10–15 days to ~4 days. Users from ~20 to 3,500. 660,000+ grievances handled — 84% through self-service channels citizens chose themselves, not a call centre they had no alternative to.
“When PM Surya Ghar scaled to crores of households, we needed a grievance platform that could scale with it. What Nanostuffs built on Salesforce has done exactly that — 660,000 grievances handled, resolution time down from two weeks to under four days, and citizens who once had no way to track their own case now have full visibility at every step. This is what a modern government grievance system should look like.”
Dheeraj Anand
General Manager, RTS/Grievance · REC Limited
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