That actually sounds a lot like a <select>. If you need to have the customer ID, you won't be able to do much with just a customer name anyway. If you accept a name, you'd need to accept a separate ID too.
With select you have <option value="123">Customer Name</option> so the user sees Customer Name but submitting the form gets 123. With datalist you only have <option value="Customer Name"/> and the input tied to it gets Customer Name.
Yes. If you want to have the id, then why are you using a text input in the first place? This seems to be exactly the use case for a <select>.
For me, datalist is almost an acceptable compromise for a typical combobox (input + select/dropdown) control. Custom solutions for that require JS and are not accessible or otherwise don't behave as a user would expect a standard input to without lots of extra work.
Scenario: You've got customers, who have names and IDs. You want to search by name, but the ID needs to be sent to the server - you're right back to doing some JavaScript hack with a hidden field that gets a data-customerid attribute or whatever off of the selected option from a datalist.