When I worked at the Plant centre at Wisley, I was in charge of the staff training for our new intake of additional temporary staff each March. We did a full day training programme with them to introduce them to the concept of Customer service.

It's something that doesn't come naturally to a lot of people, but actually we are all consumers, so really we just have to look at our own experiences to find out what our customers are likely to want.

We can then build this into our Marketing - and also use it as a benchmarking exercise to remind us how to give the best possible customer service to our clients.

When you are working with ideal customers you want them to be people who have similar ideas and values to you, which is hopefully going to mean that you'll be on exactly the same wavelength when it comes to customer service.

Write down 5 things that you need from a shop / restaurant or experience to make you feel that you've been treated specially

Now write down 5 things that you really don't like and that make you dubious about returning to be place.

How can you make sure that you follow all those good and bad points in your business?