This can be beneficial because you don't need to go hunting for the ID. However, it can be a burden when you do have the Account ID or the bigger issue - you have duplicate accounts. With larger customers, many have instances of the same customer, with the same name, many times in SFDC. This search doesn't filter down to only show customers in Gainsight, which is okay, but you have no way of knowing if you are selecting the correct one when filtering.
You also cannot select the ID field directly on the Account object as a filter, this may have changed because I believe in the past you could. The Account lookup on Customer Info is also a name search.
My idea is to actually get rid of the search and allow to search on Account ID. The Account Name field is still there so you could either add search there (don't know if that is possible) or just let users filter on the Account Name field like normal.
