I'm excited about the potential of chatbots automating small business receptions, but there are a few unknowns which I can't seem to find answers for. Even after reading the FB developer website: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform
If I had a business with many receptionists / admin staff that currently respond to customer requests via text and phone. Can they view the chatbot conversations and potentially (manually) take-over the conversation if the chatbot cannot understand the question? Following that, can the automation be turned-off and the customer just has a standard chat conversation with the multiple receptionists (as a group chat)?
Can they view the chatbot conversations and potentially (manually) take-over the conversation if the chatbot cannot understand the question?
Yes
Following that, can the automation be turned-off and the customer just has a standard chat conversation with the multiple receptionists (as a group chat)?
Yes.
The way I do this is I have the bot turned on for everybody by default, and there's an option within the bot to disable it and contact a human. That will disable the bot and send a message to a staff member who will know they need to respond.
Additionally, I have it so that staff members can disable the bot with no notification to the user, so if a user is known to not want to use chat bot functionality, a staff member can disable it manually and speak with them through messenger as the page as normal.
Commands like disabling the bot, I handle through messenger between a staff member and the chatbot, and it simply checks if your id is part of the staff before doing anything, if you're attempting to perform an administrative action such as disabling the bot for someone.
The implementation of this isn't super simple, but it's not super complicated either.
EDIT: I don't think there's anything built into Facebook that does this, and I expect them to eventually add it, but as for now, you have to handle it in your code in a way similar to how I explained here.