From what I see on your referenced page, the 24-characters are hexadecimal. If customer-id may be alphanumerical you can use base_convert to shorten the number. Unfortunately the full number is > 32bit so you need to covert it in parts to make it work:
// Pad with 0's to make sure you have 24 chars
$padded = str_repeat('0', 24 - strlen($mongoId)) . $mongoId;
$leastSignificant = base_convert(substr($padded, 14, 10), 16, 32); // will be 8 chars most
$middleSignificant = base_convert(substr($padded, 4, 10), 16, 32); // will be 8 chars most
$highSignificant = base_convert(substr($padded, 0, 4), 16, 32); // will be 4 chars most
// Concatenate, and make sure everything is correctly padded
$result = str_repeat('0', 4 - strlen($highSignificant)) . $highSignificant .
str_repeat('0', 8 - strlen($middleSignificant )) . $middleSignificant .
str_repeat('0', 8 - strlen($leastSignificant )) . $leastSignificant;
echo strlen($result); // Will echo 20
// Reverse the algoritm to retrieve the mongoId for a given customerId