Data and increasing customer information revolutionize the role of marketing. With the help of data, companies can keep up with the expectations of increasingly selective customers. However, the agile utilization of customer data still requires groundwork and training in companies. The success of data-driven marketing is highly dependent on how well companies can integrate and utilize all available customer data as part of their customer relationship management strategy. As a result of the EU data protection law (GDPR) that came into force in May 2018, customers also decide how they share their customer information with companies. This emphasizes the need for companies to build and maintain customer information systems in compliance with data protection law. Companies are as well obliged to communicate to customers on data usage and data protection.

The purpose of the study was to find the right customer information management (CIM) structure for achieving better customer knowledge among different business units. Study was done for a B2B IT service company, and structured CIM helps the company in its customer relationship management. Key concepts in the study are CIM and CRM. The research method was a qualitative case study, in which four business representatives from the different business units were interviewed with a semi-structured interview. The interviewees use customer information daily in their work. The results of the interviews provided extensive, saturated, and detailed information on the views of different business units customer information management practices. Based on the results, the B2B company's customer information management differs from the ideal situation, where the company would have good integration between the customer information systems. Ideally, the company would be also satisfied with the quality and timeliness of customer data. The situation in the target company also corresponds to a very common situation and B2B company, where customer information management is almost the opposite of the ideal situation. Possible gaps in customer information management would be solved through interorganizational collaboration, where marketing and IT would work closely together to improve it.